Elm Creek Quilts [06] The Master Quilter (26 page)

“Um, it’s Shelley from Calculus class.”

“Shelley from Calculus,” said Diane, holding out the phone to Todd. Brent shook his head and smirked as Todd ran a hand through his hair and straightened his shirt on his way to the phone.

“Hullo,” said Todd into the receiver. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Yeah … I’m already going. Sorry … Okay. Bye.” He hung up.

“I hope that conversation was more articulate on her end,” remarked Diane as she searched the pantry for the extra box of pasta she was certain she had hidden in the back.

“It would have been more interesting here, too, if you weren’t listening.” But Todd smiled and patted her on the shoulder as he passed.

“Another invitation to the prom?” asked Brent.

“Yeah.”

Surprised, Diane looked up from her search. “I didn’t know you already had a date.”

“He doesn’t,” said Brent before Todd could answer. “But he doesn’t want to go with Shelley.”

Diane kept her gaze fixed on her son. “I distinctly heard you tell that young lady you were already going.”

Todd opened his mouth to speak, but once again Brent beat him to it. “You must not know Shelley or you’d get it.”

This time Diane was too annoyed to ignore him. “If she’s in Calculus, she must be fairly bright.”

Brent began to laugh. “Yeah, but she’s a dog.”

Todd had the decency to look embarrassed, but Diane was nonetheless displeased with him. “Shelley’s not so bad, but I want to ask this girl from Physics,” he quickly explained, sensing her mood. “She’s just as smart as Shelley, and she’s on the soccer team. If she says no—”

“She won’t,” Brent interjected.

“—I’m going to ask Lisa.”

Diane’s eyebrows rose. “I thought you two broke up.”

Todd shrugged. “We did, but we’re still friends.”

“If Lisa turns you down, can I ask her?” Brent inquired. Todd grinned and shoved him.

Brent finished packing up his things, none too soon as far as Diane was concerned, and before the door closed behind him, the phone rang again. The caller was a young woman from Physics class but not, judging from Todd’s expression, the prospective prom date. She claimed to need the homework assignment, a transparent ruse Diane recognized from her own high school days. Only back then the boys did the calling; a girl never phoned a boy unless they were going steady.

Diane flipped through the mail while Todd carried out another brief, monosyllabic conversation. “You got a letter from Waterford College,” she exclaimed, withdrawing the thick envelope from the stack as he hung up the phone. “Why didn’t you open it?”

“You can, if you want.”

She quickly did so. “Todd, this is great news! You got into Waterford College!”

He looked wounded. “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

“I’m not surprised you got in.” Not with his 4.0 GPA and 1520 SATs. “Just that you don’t seem to care.”

“You know it’s just my safety school. I already got into Penn State, and I’d go there before I’d go to Waterford College.”

“Before you stick your nose too far into the air, allow me to remind you that your father teaches at Waterford College.”

“Yeah, but that’s not where he got his degrees. It’s probably a great place to work, but it’s not where I want to go to school. Mom, no offense, but I really have to get out of Waterford.”

“It’s good enough for your brother.” That was both feeble and defensive, and they both knew it. Michael would have gone elsewhere if he’d had the grades.

“It’s fine for him since they have a good Computer Science department. But if I want to get into a top law school, I have to, you know, aim high. Like you and Dad are always telling me to do.”

The argument was stupid and one-sided, so Diane dropped it. “Please don’t complain about the college in front of your father or brother. They have their pride, you know.”

“I know,” he said, and he kissed her on the cheek.

That evening after supper, Agnes called to ask if Diane could work all day Saturday, because Bonnie most likely wouldn’t be able to come in. Diane readily agreed and couldn’t resist inquiring why Bonnie had not phoned herself, but Agnes promptly found an excuse to end the call. Ignoring Agnes’s earlier admonitions not to bother Bonnie at home, Diane dialed her number, but hung up without leaving a message when the answering machine picked up. She didn’t care for their new outgoing recording, which, thanks to Craig’s brusque delivery, sounded like a suspicious demand for information and would lead a stranger to believe he lived alone.

The next day she enjoyed having Grandma’s Attic all to herself. She moved the coffeepot from Bonnie’s office to a table near the front of the store so customers could help themselves. She rearranged the shelves to disguise how bare they were, now that Bonnie could not reorder stock as readily as before, and she managed to persuade two of their most negligent customers to make payments on their long-overdue accounts. By the time she flipped the sign in the front window to
CLOSED
and locked the door behind her, she felt satisfied that she had put in a good day’s work. She wished Bonnie had been there to see it, but that would have defeated the purpose of proving how well she could handle the store on her own.

On Sunday, Michael came home to do his laundry, as he did almost every week. When he first proposed that arrangement after moving from the student dorms to a dilapidated rental house he shared with three other students, Diane had balked, certain that what he really meant was that he would dump his dirty clothes in the basement and expect to pick them up later that afternoon, washed and pressed. To her pleasant surprise, a year in a dorm with its own laundry facilities had taught Michael he could handle the work himself, and he actually did a fine job of it, though he still refused to iron. Most of the time Michael sat at the kitchen table studying—actually studying!—between changing loads, but occasionally he had time to sit and talk with her over a cup of coffee, especially if she had baked cookies earlier that day.

On that Sunday, however, he was sweating over a computer programming project and an English paper, both due before spring break, plus he had midterms coming up, so she knew better than to interrupt him once he sat down to work. When he took a break to stretch and put his whites in the dryer, she asked him what his plans were for spring break. She was curious, because by this time last year he had already hit her up twice for a trip to Cancún, requests she had flatly turned down. Still, she was surprised he had not tried again.

“I’m staying here,” Michael told her. “I have a major design project due two weeks after spring break, and I’ve barely even started it since I have all this other stuff to do.”

“That seems like poor planning on your professor’s part. Does he expect everyone to work through spring break?”

Michael shrugged. “That’s better than having it due during midterms along with everything else. College isn’t like high school, Mom. You actually have to work.”

“Yes, I seem to remember something about that from my own college years, back in the olden days,” said Diane, but she was secretly thrilled, so much so that she didn’t add a rebuke about how he actually should have worked in high school, too.

Michael turned down her invitation to stay for supper, citing too much work and plans to get pizza with his housemates. It was not until the next morning that Diane discovered he had left two pairs of jeans on the folding table in the laundry room. She knew he would wear the same pair he had worn Sunday every day for a week rather than make an extra trip home for his clean clothes, so she decided to drop them off at his house before her afternoon shift at Grandma’s Attic.

She called ahead to warn him, since she and Tim had promised never to visit unannounced. As she drove through Fraternity Row to a street of student rentals as dilapidated as Michael’s, she hoped the message she had left with a housemate counted as fair warning.

Michael, who had returned from class in the meantime, answered her knock and welcomed her in out of the cold. She handed him the jeans and looked around with misgivings, wondering how he would react if she raced to the store and returned with a carload of cleaning supplies. “Do you even have a vacuum?” she asked, eyeing the crumbs on the floor.

“No, we leave that to the mice. I’m kidding,” he added hastily.

“Sure,” she said, not sure at all, and she nodded to the interesting sculpture of empty beer cans on the floor beside a stereo system with enormous speakers. “One of your friends is an art major, I presume?”

Michael grinned. “Not exactly.”

Diane snorted and decided to leave before she saw anything else. As she kissed him good-bye at the door, a young man shouted from another room, “Yes! I got it!”

“Great,” Michael called back, and shook his head.

“What?” asked Diane.

“There’s this girl he likes in his Econ class. She’s not listed in the student directory, so he’s been looking for her cell phone number.”

“You can do that? Find cell phone numbers on the internet?”

“Sure.” Raising his voice for the benefit of the unseen roommate, he added, “And it wouldn’t take me two weeks to do it, either.”

Suddenly inspired, Diane asked, “Could you get me Mary Beth Callahan’s cell phone number?”

“Why?”

“It might come in handy someday.”

“You mean like if Todd’s out with her and Brent, and you need to contact him? Why don’t you just ask her for it?”

“Michael …” She sighed. “Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions. Can you get me the number or not?”

“Yeah, yeah, I can get it.” He hesitated. “Can I use that line sometime, about not asking too many questions?”

“Not with me and your father you can’t.”

He grumbled but agreed, and told her he would have the number by his next laundry day. Diane thanked him and went home, the first fine threads of a plan gathering in her thoughts.

Three customers were waiting in line at the cutting table when Diane arrived at Grandma’s Attic, so she quickly stashed her things, put on her apron, and took her place beside Bonnie. “Are you feeling better?” Diane asked as she unrolled a fabric bolt and measured out two yards.

“Hmm?” said Bonnie. “Oh. I suppose. Thanks.”

“Was it the flu?”

Bonnie handed the first customer her pile of cut fabric and offered to help the next person in line. “Didn’t Agnes tell you?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Bonnie fell silent as she sliced through a purple-and-green paisley cotton with her rotary cutter. “Well, I guess it was just one of those weekend things. You know.”

That sounded rather vague to Diane, but she nodded. “You know,” she said casually, “we had quite a few customers on Saturday. We—I should have said I, because I was here alone.”

“I hope it wasn’t too much for you.”

“No, of course not.” Diane handed the cut fabric to the customer. “Everything went quite smoothly. It was no trouble at all to open and close by myself, so if you ever need me to do it again, just let me know.”

“Thanks.” Bonnie finished assisting the last customer and headed to the cash register to ring up the three women’s purchases. Diane rolled up the fabric bolts and returned them to their shelves. By the time she finished, the store was empty except for herself and Bonnie, who had taken a seat on a stool beside the front counter, visibly drained. No doubt she still felt the effects of her illness. “I apologize for imposing on you last weekend,” Bonnie said.

“Not at all.” Diane leaned back against the cutting table and smiled. She had thought that Bonnie’s first day back would be the best time to approach her about going full-time, with her emergency substitution fresh in Bonnie’s mind, but the conversation wasn’t going as well as she had hoped. “You know how much I enjoy working here. It sure beats volunteering for another committee at the high school.”

Bonnie’s gaze had shifted past Diane to the shelves of sewing machines on the far wall. “Schools need involved parents.”

“Well, of course, but once Todd graduates, I won’t be a class parent anymore. Did I tell you Todd has pretty much rejected Waterford College? If he chooses Penn State, the tuition won’t be that bad, but if he gets into Princeton—” Diane laughed. “Let’s just say I’d rather work overtime than take out a second mortgage.”

Bonnie said, distantly, “I’m afraid I can’t afford to pay overtime.”

“I know that,” said Diane, bemused. “I was kidding.”

“Oh. Okay, then.” Bonnie rose and walked toward the back of the store.

“Not about working more,” Diane called after her as Bonnie entered her office and sat down at the computer. “I wasn’t kidding about that part.”

If Bonnie heard, she gave no sign.

That evening, Diane drove to Elm Creek Manor to submit her proposed course schedule, already more than a week overdue and probably unnecessary since Sarah and Summer were well into arranging the master schedule. Her conversation with Bonnie ran through her thoughts, making her more displeased with each repetition. She should have been more forthright. When had delicacy and tact ever served her well? Bonnie had probably left the discussion thinking Diane resented working the extra hours, which meant Diane was now worse off than before.