The Goodbye Quilt by Susan Wiggs

down. We walk out of the store with a parcel as big as the quilt bag. It’s filled with new jeans and shoes, a top and sweater and skirt, a wrap dress and hoop earrings, and a melon-colored paisley scarf I couldn’t bear to leave behind. Molly and Darcy made me keep the new undergarments on, leaving my elastic-less ones in the trash. “When you start with a good foundation,” Darcy pointed out, “everything looks better.”
    “Well,” I say, setting the shopping bag on the backseat next to the quilt. “That was unexpected.”
    “That was fun,” Molly said. “Way more fun than a fabric shop.”
    “A different kind of fun than the fabric shop.”
    She’s not done, and her enthusiasm is infectious. On Darcy’s recommendation, we go to a nearby salon for a shampoo and style. We have our toenails polished candy pink and emerge from the salon flipping our hair around and giggling.
    “Look at us,” Molly says, primping in the Suburban’s visor mirror. “We’re new women.”

Chapter Eight
    The next day, the sheen is off our hair. Molly urges me to wear something new but I decline, not wanting to wrinkle the clothes, sitting in the car all day. The bag with the beautiful new things stays on the backseat. The outfits are too nice for a car trip. I want to save them for something special.
    According to the peeling roadside billboards, we have two choices for lunch—a Stuckey’s that has ninety-nine-cent burgers, or Bubba’s Beach Shack, on the scenic shores of Lake Ontario.
    “It’s a lake,” Molly says. “How can it have a beach?”
    “It’s one of the Great Lakes.” I am nearly cross-eyed from sewing. The end of our journey loomscloser, an outcome I can see and practically touch. I stayed up late last night, working on the quilt. Working is, of course, an elastic concept. I can be staring out at the night sky and call it “working” if I’m planning the next quilt.
    “I never thought about a lake having a beach. Back home it’s just…a shore, I guess.”
    “We should have taken you to see the Great Lakes when you were little.” And here it is again, that sense of things left undone, unfinished. What else have I forgotten to show her, to teach her?
    She glances over at me. “You took me to Mount Rushmore and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. You can’t show me everything.”
    “I wish I had, though. We always had such fun on those summer driving trips, didn’t we?”
    There is a heartbeat of hesitation. And in that heartbeat, I hear a contradiction. Could be, she has memories of being hot, carsick, bored. Sometimes Dan and I were short-tempered and we were terrible at picking out places to stay. Bad motel karma became a family joke. Remembrances of summers past are marred by nonfunctioning swimming pools, moldy smells, shag carpets.
    “Sure,” Molly says. “We had a blast.”
    “But the Great Lakes—I remember going to Mackinac Island on my high school senior trip. I saved up for months in order to go. It was so beautiful, like stepping back in time. I wish we’d taken you there.”
    “You can’t take me everywhere,” she repeats.
    New adventures lie ahead of her, a vast stretch of unexplored terrain. She’ll be taking trips without me, seeing and experiencing things I’ll never share. Which is as it should be, I remind myself.
    Without further debate, she takes the next exit and wends her way through a threadbare town of redbrick buildings and convenience stores plastered with fading advertising posters. The route to Bubba’s is well-marked, and within a few minutes we enter Tanaka State Park in western New York, a quiet oasis on a weekday afternoon. As we head to ward the water, I notice that the colors of summer are fading here, the greens subtly shifting to yellow, the wildflowers casting their petals to the breeze.
    The beach shack is adorable, and I’m instantly glad we’ve come. It has a huge deck with picnic tables covered in red-and-white checkered