The Quilt Read Free Page A

her, sometimes it’s like I’m talking right to her heart. Like there’s not a thing between me and all that love.”
    â€œJust scoop out all you need and carry it away,” Jody added.
    â€œIf I was sick, I’d rather go talk with Mary for five minutes than have fifteen doctors work on me all day,” Lou Ann’s next-door neighbor and best friend, Lynn Forrest, told them. Lou Ann and Mary were the only persons in the whole wide world who still called her Lynn. When her husband, Tommy, had started courting her, he had renamed her Rooster, on account of her red hair, her jerky way of moving, and the fact that her maiden name had been Rosters. Lynn said knowing that she was going to have to hear that for the rest of her life had just about done the marriage in before it had started.
    There were five of them gathered in Jody’s kitchen thatmorning. Amy Harris was a friend from down the road, a heavyset woman with the biggest laugh anybody’d ever heard. Her laugh wasn’t loud. It was just plain big. When Amy laughed, there was just too much happiness and humor there for anybody within hearing range not to smile. Her friends had the habit of looking over at one another when they heard that big bell-shaped laugh ring out. It gave them something to grin about without being so self-conscious. They would look at one another and chuckle like, there she goes again, Amy’s laughing. Can you believe it? Amy didn’t mind their laughing at her. It was enough just to have them laugh.
    The other woman was a tiny wisp of a lady Lynn’s husband Tommy had renamed Tidbit. Her real name was Nancy Starling, and she made up for her lack of size with an energy that was just plain awesome. She stood a full four feet ten inches tall in her lace-up shoes and weighed about as much as a wet breeze. She was a nurse at the hospital where Lynn worked as a physical therapist, and had the tendency to make her patients want to stand at attention in bed when she walked into the room. Nancy needed to stand on her tiptoes to take their temperature when the beds were cranked upright, but even the doctors had long since learned not to cross Nurse Tidbit, as everyone called her behind her back. Tommy’s names had a habit of sticking like burrs in a horse’s mane.
    â€œThat woman is a saint,” Nancy said quietly, washing blackberries with a speed that made her hands blur. “Every time I see her I tell myself I wish there was something more I could do for her.”
    They had been out picking blackberries and were getting ready to make cobbler. They were all itching from redbug bites and stained from forehead to knees with blackberry juice, and all were having an enormously good time. Jody was known for making the best blackberry cobbler in three counties. But the pies were really just an excuse for five good friends to get together and ramble through the woods and laugh and spend a morning catching up on one another’s lives.
    â€œIt’s hard to do anything for Mary,” Jody agreed, pressing out a dozen mounds of pie-crust batter with her rolling pin. One of the secrets of her cobbler was that the crust was made with butter-cookie dough. “She makes me feel like a little girl playing with her mother’s things whenever I say I’d like to help her with something.”
    â€œMaybe so,” Lou Ann said. “But just the same I’m worried about her this time. She’s too old to be taking on a quilt by herself.”
    â€œMaybe if we all went together she’d listen to us,” Nancy said doubtfully.
    â€œWe’ll take up one of the cobblers and talk to her,” Jody decided for all of them.
    But it sure as goodness wasn’t all easy street, taking a fresh-baked pie or cake into Mary’s house. She was the legendary baker to three generations. The highest accolade a cake or pie could receive was, you’ve been taking lessons up at Mary’s,