Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series (21 page)

Greg left his meeting with Dr. Maxwell and called Elise. He wanted to tell her about the interview before he arrived at the quilting group. “I’m going back on one of the clinic days, and that will tell me a lot about the practice as well. But, I’m thinking this could be a blessing. It’s close to the house, and the owner is someone I really think I can work with.”

“I’ll add it to the prayer list,” she said. “Do you realize the older we get, the longer the list is?”

“And with that, I’m calling Paloma,” he said. She and Jazarah were making cookies. He pictured the kitchen decorated with chips and icing and his daughter probably finger-painting with cookie dough. That was a mess he didn’t mind missing right now.

It was later than usual when Greg arrived at the fellowship hall, so he was surprised to see so many cars still in the parking lot. He opened the door and saw a man taking pictures. And Nina.
Nina?

She smiled when she saw him. “Don’t worry, I looked like you do now when they told me you were actually a part of this group,” she said. “I didn’t know, of course, that night at the
benefit that you actually designed the quilt I liked. You’re a man of many talents, Dr. Hernandez.”

And you’re a woman who continues to surprise me
. Which he might have actually said had he not been distracted by the scent of gardenias that lingered after she’d reached out and patted his shoulder. “See, I’m not just another pretty face, am I?” he said, but Nina didn’t participate in his smiling. Greg saw the way her eyes searched his face, and he realized it wasn’t a joke to her. It was exactly what she thought of him. Ever since high school.

She looked at him and, like someone who’d just decided to participate in the auction bidding, nodded. “My eyesight must have improved over the years. I see exactly what you mean,” she said and mirrored his grin with her own. “Okay, time to exude your boyish charm for the camera. I want you to meet Brady.”

Greg recognized him as soon as he introduced himself. The man driving the white convertible the night of the benefit. The convertible with Nina in the passenger seat.

“I photographed quilts the night of the benefit. Your group’s quite talented,” said Brady.

“Thanks,” Greg replied, “I’m blessed to be surrounded by creative people. Who make cookies and keep me coming back.”

The women at the table laughed. Brady walked over to Nina who was examining some quilts in progress. Greg watched Brady and Nina. Actually, he watched Brady watch Nina as she pointed to places around the room. Could he have missed some connection between the two? A connection more than a reporter and photographer? He waited as they spoke and looked for those suggestions of intimacy between a couple. Hands, eyes, laughter that lingered, or the space between them narrowing as if drawn together by their sheer magnetism. Greg
witnessed none of those between the two, and the relief he experienced was its own signal.

Greg joined Brady and Nina. He reminded himself to focus on the conversation and not the tilt of her head when she asked a question or the curve of her waist as she held a square up to examine or how she used her thumb to twirl the pearl ring on her ring finger as she spoke.

The three of them walked around the room. Greg showed them patterns, sample squares, bolts of fabric, and pictures that had been taken of other quilts they’d sewn. “One of the goals we’re working on is to make a panel for everyone in the group who’s lost someone to AIDS. It’s taking a while longer than we expected because we work on those when we can. But it gives the group time to save money for another goal. We hope to be able to personally deliver those squares to D.C.”

“Impressive,” said Brady. “You know, a friend of mine, someone I grew up with, died of AIDS five years ago. I don’t know if they’ve ever thought of creating a panel for him.”

Crystal’s mother, Kelley, sitting nearby, turned to Brady. “Didn’t mean to be eavesdropping, but there is a way for you to find if there’s already a panel for your friend.”

“Thanks, but if you mean going to a display, I don’t have time—”

“No. No. You don’t have to travel at all. Watch,” Kelley said and asked Nina if she could use her iPad. “Even the Quilt is joining the 21st century. Look.” She showed them the web app that people can use to browse the entire collection of panels and even read personal stories.

“What a great sidebar this will be for the first profile,” Nina said.

“Guess I need a tech training session. I didn’t realize you were so app-aware, Kelley,” Greg said as he bookmarked the site on his cell phone.

“I’m not,” Kelley said as she pointed to her daughter. “Crystal’s the one who’s always searching and researching.” She tucked the ringlets that curtained her daughter’s face behind as ears as Crystal steered her scissors around yellow and orange flowers on what was once a skirt.

“Because if I didn’t,” Crystal said as she moved the skirt into a basket of other shorn clothes, “you would still be using a cell phone the size of a shoe box.”

“True,” Kelley said and helped her daughter spread out a large chintz curtain.

Brady took a few more shots, then left after he and Nina scheduled a series of interview times. Greg scanned the list she showed him. “You didn’t ask me,” he said.

“You’re right. Interviewing the person who helps design all these quilts would be another angle.” Nina opened her calendar.

“Is that what I am? An angle?” Greg shook his head as if dismayed by the revelation. “Sorry, Miss O’Malley, but you have it all wrong.”

Nina’s eyes drilled into him. “I what?”

“I’m not your angle,” he said. Greg knew he was about to learn more about Nina O’Malley than she would learn about him. “Jazarah, my daughter, is the angle. She’s HIV-positive.”

Sitting in Carraba’s, the one restaurant that Nina could think of in a stunned state, she looked across the table at Greg as he listened to a voicemail about one of his patients. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t mind at all that he had a pretty face. In fact, she wondered why this man, who walked into a room and women knew he was there, might be interested in her.
Or, Nina, maybe he’s not. Being nice to someone doesn’t equal a relationship
.

When Nina heard his daughter’s name, she felt like that spinning beach ball that appeared when a program on her laptop wasn’t processing information. Greg not only had a daughter, she was Ethiopian and HIV-positive. Nina realized that everything she thought she knew about Greg was about to be redefined.

When her belated response to him was, “I’m confused,” he told her he understood. And that’s when he suggested dinner, so he could, as he said, “unconfuse” her.

The waitress, whose name badge read “Roxie,” brought their meals, grilled salmon with tomato basil vinaigrette for him and tilapia with garlic for Nina. When Greg thanked her, she flashed him a lipsticked smile that could have melted pats of butter. “Need anything else?” She didn’t even pretend to look at Nina.

“I’d appreciate a refill,” said Nina and held up her iced tea glass.

Roxie barely turned in her direction. “Sure, I’ll be right back.” She picked up the glass like she was taking it in the kitchen to dust for fingerprints and strolled off.

Nina laughed when she walked away. “I think Roxie would like for you to be quite needy.”

“Really? Why?” He handed Nina the bread basket.

“You’re oblivious. It’s endearing,” said Nina. “So, tell me about your daughter. Who, by the way, oozes personality.” A quality that definitely could have connected her genetically to Greg.

“She does, doesn’t she? Makes me think that in ten or so years, I’m going to have to be quite a vigilant father.” He smiled and, though he looked at Nina, it was as if a picture of his daughter was behind her. “We brought her home, underweight
and underdeveloped, and depended on prayer and love. And, so far, it’s working.”

Nina ate a few bites of her tilapia contemplating how to send the train of their conversation down a different track so she could ask about his wife. Maybe the divorce was messy, maybe she cheated on him, or maybe she was home scraping his uneaten dinner down the waste disposal. The suggestion of that discombobulated her and sent her fork to her plate in a noisy landing.

Of course, Roxie appeared with her fresh glass of iced tea at that moment, and Nina could almost hear Roxie’s brain telegraphing Greg, “Oh, you’re such a kind man to participate in Take a Klutz to Dinner night.” Roxie set Nina’s glass on the table, then let her eyes linger on Greg for a while and announced she’d return later with a dessert menu.
Hoping I’ll order something so calorie-evil, I’ll need a different size dress to leave the restaurant
.

Nina, you’re a journalist. If you can’t ask the hard questions, Elise will assign you to Cub Scout banquets
. First, she put her fork down, then she spotted Roxie serving a table of eight, she knew she couldn’t wait or else she’d be detailing the ingredients of every dessert on the menu to Greg. She plunged in. “Did things not work out between you and your wife?”

Greg’s reaction came in waves, starting with surprise, then confusion, then he sat back in his chair as if pushed there by the force of her question. He looked down at the table, but when his eyes met Nina’s, she heard the sad understanding of his response, “When you live with something for a long time, you start to assume everyone knows.” Greg placed his napkin on his now bare plate. “Lily died in an automobile accident right before Jazarah’s second birthday.”

She was about to say she was sorry when a memory rushed forward, pulled by the weight of his words. The night of the
benefit, her angry retort, “I prayed pain would bury itself in you,” and his reply that she no longer needed to utter that prayer. If shame had its own taste, it coated her mouth like mucous. The horror of her arrogance spilled out of her eyes and trembled in her hands. Her heart’s voice couldn’t be heard above the deafening roar of regret.

Before she could speak, Greg silenced everything in her that screamed at her own meanness. He reached across the table, his hand quieting hers. “Nina, you didn’t know. You didn’t know.”

With her other hand she blotted her face with her napkin. “That’s not an excuse for . . .”

“You’re right, it’s not. But I forgive you, I really do.”

“Forgive me? How can you? I don’t deserve forgiveness—”

“If we deserved it, it wouldn’t be forgiveness. And I can do this because God does it for me. Sometimes on a daily basis.”

Nina left the table to rid herself of “the black streams of tears” flowing down her face. Greg called Paloma and asked if it would be a problem if he was home later than he anticipated.

His nanny laughed. “Dr. Hernandez, you do not have a curfew, but I am glad you called. Jazarah saved you cookies, and she put them on the fireplace. ‘Like Santa,’ she said. So you must eat them . . . or something . . . so they will be gone when she awakes.”

He promised he would and told her he’d be home within the next two hours.

“Are you still at the quilting meeting?” She sounded concerned that he might be.

“No, I’m having dinner with a friend, Nina O’Malley. Her dog, Manny, is the one I got the ER call about when we were on our way to lunch. If fact, she was in the waiting room the same time you and the little princess were. Tallish, short dark hair.” He looked up to see Nina ease into her chair, then tuck her bangs behind her ear, only to have them slide back down. A familiar gesture, one he used to see in Lily whenever she felt self-conscious. Greg smiled at her, then realized he had no idea what Paloma had said. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that.”

“Have a good time, Dr. Hernandez.”

“I already am. Thanks.” He ended the call, and Roxie appeared at his elbow asking about coffee and a dessert menu. They both ordered coffee and, to their waitress’s disappointment, passed on dessert.

Roxie delivered the two coffees, telling Greg she’d “be delighted, for sure” to provide him refills, and swayed away.

“Is it painful? To talk about her, I mean. Lily must have been a remarkable woman to open her heart to adopt an HIV-positive child.”

Greg leaned forward, hands clasped on the table, and smiled. “No, not now. After she died, people sometimes apologized if her name came up in conversation or, worse, didn’t talk about her at all. As if she never existed.”

His neighbors Dale and Amelia, whose son died of cancer at the age of twenty-eight, understood the importance of not smothering the memories of loved ones under blankets of silence. Greg knew it was that empathy that drew him to involvement in the We Care benefit and supporting The AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Every panel represented a family sharing and celebrating the life of someone they loved. Greg told Nina about Lily’s passion for life, how when she loved, she gave it all away. Her drive to bring Jazarah home sometimes drove a wedge between them because when she decided to go after something, she was not going to be denied. Greg would argue, when the paperwork and the politics overwhelmed the process, that maybe they should wait or try to adopt in the states.

One night, she must have printed copies of the picture she’d taken in New York of the quilt panel of the five-month-old little girl who died of AIDS. When he woke up the next morning, they were taped all over the house. On his bathroom mirror, the refrigerator, doors, cabinets. Even the rearview
mirror of his car. He’d walked back inside that day, wrapped his arms around her waist, and whispered, “You win. There’s a baby waiting for us to pray her home.”