The Coffee Can
Rhonda ran the raffle every year.
She sold the tickets. She kept the coffee can of stubs. She drew the name herself, up front, with the microphone.
That’s how it had been at Grace Lutheran in Belden, Iowa, for eleven years. Ever since Rhonda took over the Fellowship Committee from old Ruth Kessler, who passed the job on along with her recipe for scalloped corn and a firm belief that nobody else could be trusted with either.
So when the church supper ended that Saturday night in October, and the pie plates were scraped and the folding chairs were scraping too, Rhonda stepped up to the little podium at the front of the fellowship hall with a red Folgers can in one hand and the microphone in the other.
“All right, everybody,” she said. “This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for.”
The quilt was hanging on the wall behind her.
My quilt.
They’d strung a clothesline between two coat hooks and draped it there, so it hung down all the way to the floor. Double Wedding Ring. Soft colors. Pale yellow, sage green, a rose pink so faint it was almost white. Interlocking rings across the whole top, every ring made of thirty-two little curved pieces.
It was the prettiest thing in that room, and I’m not saying that to brag. Everybody said so. Women had been coming up to touch the edge of it all night, running their fingers along the binding.
“Joan, how did you ever get those curves so even?” Edna Stoltz asked me during the meatloaf.
“Patience,” I told her. “And my mother’s thimble.”
I had pieced that quilt all winter.
Every curved seam by hand. Ten stitches to the inch. I started the second week of November, after the corn was in, and I didn’t put the last stitch in the binding until the first week of March. Four months of my evenings. Sitting in the rocker by the woodstove in our front room after supper, with the lamp turned up and the radio on low, while Dale read the Farm Bureau Spokesman and fell asleep in his chair.
My mother’s thimble on my finger the whole time. A silver one, worn thin on top from forty years of her pushing needles through cotton. She gave it to me the year before she died.
It was for the furnace fund.
The furnace at Grace Lutheran was older than me. That’s not an exaggeration. It was installed in 1958, an old oil burner the size of a pickup truck, down in the basement next to the Sunday school rooms. Every winter it took three men and a prayer to get it started.
Last January it quit entirely during the Christmas program. The children sang “Silent Night” in their coats, and you could see their breath.
The church council got an estimate for a new one in February. Fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars, from Kaufman Heating in Waverly. For a little country church with sixty-three members on the rolls and about forty in the pews on a good Sunday, that was a mountain.
So everybody pitched in. Bake sales. A pancake breakfast. A free-will offering at the Easter service. And the fall supper raffle, with a quilt.
My quilt.
Two dollars a ticket. Three for five.
We sold the most tickets we ever had. Five hundred and seventy-three of them. That came to over eleven hundred dollars, Rhonda announced proudly, after the pie and before the drawing. The biggest raffle Grace Lutheran had ever had.
“Because that’s the prettiest quilt we’ve put up in years,” somebody said from the back. Harlan Moeller, I think.
Everybody clapped. I looked down at my shoes.
Now Rhonda stood at the podium with the red Folgers can.
She held it up so everybody could see. She smiled. She had on her good fall sweater, the orange one with the little embroidered leaves, and her hair was set the way she does it for church, in stiff blonde waves.
“Before I draw,” she said into the microphone, “I just want to thank Joan Hartwig for donating this beautiful quilt. Joan, stand up so everybody can see you.”
I was by the coffee urn in the back with a dish towel on my shoulder. I’d been refilling cups all night. I raised my hand a little. Everybody turned and clapped again.
“Isn’t she something?” Rhonda said. “My brother’s a lucky man.”
Then she reached into the can.
I watched her do it. I want to be clear about that. I was standing in the back of that fellowship hall with a dish towel on my shoulder, and I watched every single second.
She didn’t shake the can. Not once.
When you draw a raffle ticket, you shake the can first. Everybody knows that. You shake it hard, so the stubs get mixed up, so the ones on the bottom have the same chance as the ones on top. You hold it up over your head, so nobody can say you looked. You close your eyes or turn your head. That’s how it’s done. That’s how Ruth Kessler did it for thirty years.
Rhonda didn’t shake it. She didn’t hold it up. She tipped it toward herself and reached in with her right hand and felt around for a second, looking down into the can.
Then she pulled out one stub.
She unfolded it slowly. She read it. She put her hand on her chest.
“Oh my goodness,” she said into the microphone. “Oh, you all are not going to believe this.”
She looked up at the crowd. Her eyes were shining.
“The winner,” she said, “is Katie.”
Katie is her daughter.
Twenty-three years old. Getting married in June to a boy named Tyler Brandt who worked at the John Deere plant in Waterloo. She was sitting at the second table from the front, next to her fiancé, wearing a sweater the exact same orange as her mother’s.
Katie’s face went red. She put both hands over her mouth.
People clapped. Some of them, anyway. I heard a few laughs, the kind that don’t have much behind them. I heard Edna Stoltz say, “Well, isn’t that something,” in a voice that meant something else entirely.
Rhonda was laughing into the microphone. “I swear I didn’t plan it! A wedding quilt for my girl! Honest to goodness, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
I was by the coffee urn with a dish towel on my shoulder.
I smiled.
I know how to smile with nothing behind it. I learned at my own mother’s funeral, standing in the receiving line for three hours. You turn up the corners of your mouth and you keep your eyes soft and you nod. You can do it for a long time if you have to.
I stood there and smiled while Katie came up and Rhonda hugged her, and they took my quilt down off the clothesline, and Katie held it up against herself and everybody clapped again.
Then I turned around and filled the coffee urn, even though it was already full.
Chapter Two: The Drive Home
I did not see her slip a stub.
I want to be honest about that, because honesty is the only thing I have in this whole story. I did not see Rhonda take a ticket out of her pocket or her sleeve. I didn’t see her mark one. I didn’t see her pull it from the top of the pile where she’d put it.
Nobody did.
But a fair person shakes the can first. She didn’t shake it. I would swear to that in church, with my hand on the Bible.
Swearing isn’t proof, though. I know that too.
Dale drove us home in the dark.
We live four miles out of Belden on a gravel road, in the farmhouse Dale’s grandfather built in 1922. We farmed three hundred and twenty acres of corn and beans for thirty-eight years. Now Dale rents most of it out to the Hoffman boys and keeps forty acres and a few beef cows, because his knees aren’t what they were.
He drove his old Silverado with the window cracked, the way he always does, even in October. The headlights swept across the ditches. The fields on both sides were stubble now, gray and flat under a half moon.
He didn’t say anything for the first two miles. Neither did I.
Then, just past the Mueller place, he cleared his throat.
“You going to say something,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Say what,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. He reached over and turned down the radio, which was already off.
“That I think she pulled her own girl’s name?” I said.
There it was. Out loud. In the cab of the truck, in the dark.
Dale didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the road.
“She didn’t shake it,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“Ruth always shook it. Every year. Like she was mixing paint.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for another half mile. Rhonda is his little sister. Six years younger. He taught her to ride a bike and drove her to her prom and walked her down the aisle when their father was too sick to do it.
“Pastor Dahl could ask her,” Dale said finally. “Quiet. Just ask her.”
“And then what,” I said.
I’d been thinking about it since the moment she said “Katie.” I’d been thinking about it while I washed forty coffee cups in the church kitchen.
“She cries,” I said. “Katie cries. Rhonda says how dare anybody accuse her, after eleven years running that raffle for free. She says she’s never been so hurt in her life.”
Dale didn’t say anything. He knew his sister.
“And half the church takes her side,” I said. “Because she’s done the funeral lunches for twenty years. Because she brings scalloped corn to every potluck. Because she cried.”
“And the other half,” Dale said.
“Takes mine. Because I made the quilt. Because Edna Stoltz saw it too. Because a lot of people have been waiting a long time to say something about Rhonda.”
I looked out the window at the dark fields.
“And come Easter,” I said, “we have two churches in one building. Sitting on opposite sides. Not talking at coffee hour. Arguing at council meetings about the furnace. Over a quilt.”
We’d seen it happen before. In 1997, Grace Lutheran almost split over whether to put carpet in the sanctuary. The Heinrichs and the Volkmanns didn’t speak to each other for six years. Three families left for the Methodist church in Denver.
Over carpet.
“I can’t prove she rigged it,” I said. “And I won’t split the church over a quilt.”
Dale nodded slowly.
“So you’re going to say nothing.”
“I’m going to say nothing.”
He reached across the bench seat and put his big rough hand over mine. He held it the rest of the way home.
For a week I scrubbed things already clean.
That’s what I do when something sits wrong in me. My mother did it too. I scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I took every plate out of the cupboard and washed it and put it back. I cleaned the oven. I washed the windows inside and out, even though it was forty degrees and the wind was blowing.
Dale came in from the barn on Wednesday and found me on a ladder, scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
“Joan,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Nobody’s been up there since 1985.”
“Then it needed it.”
He stood there in his barn coat looking at me for a long time. Then he went back out.
It wasn’t the quilt. Not really.
I mean, it was. Four months of my evenings, hanging on Katie Pfeiffer’s bed. I won’t pretend that didn’t sting.
But it wasn’t the cheating either. Rhonda’s been bending little rules her whole life. Taking the biggest piece of pie. Cutting in line at the pancake breakfast. Getting her picture in the paper for the food drive even though Edna did all the work.
That wasn’t what kept me up at night.
What kept me up at night was Pearl.
Chapter Three: Sixty Dollars in Quarters
Pearl Wendt is eighty-one.
She lost her husband, Vern, in a bean field nine years ago. He was walking beans on a hot July afternoon, pulling volunteer corn out of the rows by hand, the way the old-timers still did. He was seventy-five. His heart gave out somewhere around the middle of the field.
Pearl found him at suppertime when he didn’t come in. She walked out to look for him in her house shoes.
She said later he was lying on his back between the rows, looking up at the sky, like he’d just decided to take a rest. His seed corn cap was still on his head.
They’d rented their farm. They’d never owned land. When Vern died, the landlord’s son rented the ground to somebody else, and the farmhouse went with it.
So Pearl moved to town. Into half a house on Third Street. A little white duplex near the grain elevator, built in the forties, with a sagging porch and a storm door that didn’t latch. She rented the east half. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month, from a man in Cedar Falls she’d never met.
She lived on Vern’s Social Security. Nine hundred and twelve dollars a month. That’s it. No pension. No savings to speak of. They’d spent everything they had on Vern’s bypass surgery in 2009.
I didn’t know Pearl well before that October. I knew her the way you know people at church. She sat in the back row on the left, in the same spot every Sunday. She wore the same navy blue coat every winter. She always brought a pan of bars to the potluck. Plain ones. Oatmeal or peanut butter. Never anything fancy.
She was quiet. She didn’t serve on committees. She didn’t sing loud. She came early and left late and smiled at everybody.
Then, at the fall supper, I saw her buy raffle tickets.
It was before the meal, at the card table by the door where Rhonda was selling them. I was carrying a tray of coffee cups past, and I stopped, because Pearl was counting out money.
In quarters.
She had them in a little cloth coin purse. She was taking them out and stacking them on the card table. In fours. One dollar. One dollar. One dollar. Little silver towers, in a neat row, like she’d been practicing.
She stacked up sixty dollars.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
“Pearl,” Rhonda said, laughing. “That’s a lot of tickets, honey.”
“It’s for the furnace,” Pearl said. “And I’ve had my eye on that quilt since you hung it.”
She looked over at the wall where it was hanging. My quilt. The Double Wedding Ring in the soft colors.
“I never owned a quilt somebody made new,” she said.
She said it so simply. Not complaining. Just a fact, like the weather.
“Vern’s mother had some old ones,” she said. “But they were all worn through by the time they came to me. I’ve been sleeping under one with a hole in the middle for forty years.” She smiled. “I’d like to sleep under something new before I go. Just once.”
Rhonda counted the quarters. She tore off sixty dollars’ worth of tickets. Thirty-six tickets. At three for five, it should have been thirty-six. She gave Pearl thirty.
I noticed. I didn’t say anything.
Pearl folded her stubs carefully and put them in her coin purse. Then she went and sat down in the back row of the fellowship hall with a plate of meatloaf.
She didn’t win either.
When Rhonda said “Katie,” I looked at the back row. I couldn’t help it.
Pearl was sitting there with her coin purse in her lap. Her face didn’t change. Not a flicker.
And then she clapped for Katie.
Slowly. Politely. From the back row. The way you clap at a funeral when somebody finishes a hymn.
That was the part I couldn’t let go of.
Not the cheating. Not my four months of evenings. Not even Rhonda standing up there saying the Lord works in mysterious ways.
The sixty dollars.
A widow’s grocery money. Two hundred and forty quarters she’d saved, probably one at a time, from God knows where. On a paper chance. For a quilt she’d never own.
That’s what had me on a ladder scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
Chapter Four: The Visit
The second week, I drove into town on a Tuesday.
I told Dale I needed thread from the Ben Franklin. That was true. But I drove past the Ben Franklin and turned left on Third Street and parked across from the little white duplex by the grain elevator.
I sat in the car for a long time. I didn’t know what I was going to say.
Then I saw Pearl come out onto her porch. She was wearing her navy coat and carrying a plastic Hy-Vee bag full of something. She came slowly down the porch steps, one hand on the railing, and walked down the sidewalk toward the end of the block.
I followed her. Slowly. In the car. Like a fool.
She walked two blocks to the Casey’s General Store on Main Street. Not inside. Around the back. To the redemption machine by the dumpster, where you return your pop cans.
She opened her Hy-Vee bag and started feeding cans into the machine. One at a time. The machine sucked them in with a little rattle and spat out a ticket.
Five cents a can. That’s what Iowa pays for a returned can. The bottle bill.
She had maybe forty cans. Two dollars.
When she was done, she took the ticket into the store and came back out with two dollars in quarters. She put them in her cloth coin purse.
And walked home.
I sat in my car in the Casey’s parking lot and cried so hard I had to turn the engine off.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
Twelve hundred cans.
She walked the ditches. I found that out later. Along Highway 3, and the county road out past the cemetery, and the ball diamond after the Little League games. Picking up cans other people threw away. Every day. For years.
She took that money and bought raffle tickets for a quilt. For the furnace fund. For the church.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in bed next to Dale, listening to him snore and the wind push at the old windows. I thought about Pearl’s quilt with the hole in the middle. Forty years.
I thought about my mother. About sitting on the floor of her sewing room in Clarksville when I was eight, sorting scraps by color into coffee cans while she worked. About the sound of her treadle machine. About the way she’d hold up a finished quilt to the window and squint at it.
“A quilt is just a prayer you can sleep under,” she told me once. “Every stitch is a little wish for whoever’s going to use it.”
Around two in the morning, I got up.
I went downstairs in my robe and turned on the lamp in the front room. I went to the closet under the stairs and pulled out my scrap bins. Six big plastic tubs, full of fabric, sorted by color, the way my mother taught me.
I couldn’t undo the drawing. I couldn’t prove anything. I couldn’t make Rhonda shake the can.
But nobody could stop me making another quilt.
So I did.
Chapter Five: The Second Winter
I started the next night. After Dale went up to bed.
This time I made a Grandmother’s Flower Garden. It’s the oldest pattern I know. My grandmother made one. My mother made three. I’d never made one myself, because it takes forever.
It’s made of hexagons. Little six-sided pieces, each one about the size of a half dollar. You sew seven of them together into a flower: one in the center and six around it. Then you sew a ring of green hexagons around that, for the leaves. Then you sew the flowers together with white hexagons in between, like a garden path.
A queen-size Flower Garden takes about two thousand hexagons. Every one of them cut by hand and basted over a paper template and whipstitched to its neighbor.
One flower at a time.
I chose the colors carefully.
The petals were every color I had. Pinks and yellows and lavenders. Old feed sack prints from my mother’s scrap bins. A green check from a dress I wore in high school. A red calico from Dale’s mother’s apron. Little flowers from everybody’s life, all mixed together.
But the centers were all the same. Every single flower.
Blue. A soft, faded blue with a tiny white dot. It came from my mother’s old housedress. The one she wore every day in her kitchen for twenty years. The one she was wearing in the last picture I have of her, standing at her stove in Clarksville, laughing at something my father said.
After she died, I couldn’t throw it away. I’d kept it folded in my cedar chest for eleven years.
Now I cut it into hexagons. One for the heart of every flower.
Dale found me the first night. He came downstairs at midnight for a glass of water and saw the lamp on.
He stood in the doorway in his long underwear and looked at me in the rocker, with my lap full of paper hexagons and Mom’s thimble on my finger.
“Another one,” he said.
“Another one.”
He didn’t ask who it was for. He knew.
He went to the kitchen and filled his glass. On his way back through, he stopped and put more wood in the stove. Then he went up to bed.
He did that every night that winter. Put more wood in the stove on his way to bed. Never said a word about it.
The winter was long that year. It snowed the week before Thanksgiving and didn’t stop. By January, there were drifts against the machine shed higher than Dale’s head.
I sewed through all of it.
Some nights I’d do one flower. Some nights only half of one. My eyes aren’t what they were, and the hexagons are small, and my mother’s thimble was getting thin on top, just like hers had.
I counted them, the way she taught me. Stitches to the inch. Hexagons to the flower. Flowers to the row.
When I got to fifty flowers, I laid them out on the dining room table. Dale came in from chores and stood looking at them.
“That’s a lot of little pieces,” he said.
“Two thousand and four,” I said.
He whistled.
In December, the church council met to talk about the furnace.
The raffle had raised eleven hundred and forty-six dollars. With everything else, the bake sales and the free-will offerings and a gift from the Hoffman family, the furnace fund had about nine thousand dollars. Still almost six thousand short.
Kaufman Heating said they couldn’t hold the price past spring.
Dale was on the council that year. He came home from the meeting in a quiet mood. He hung his coat on the hook by the door and stood by the woodstove warming his hands.
“Rhonda gave a report,” he said. “On the raffle. She said it was the most successful fundraiser in church history.” He paused. “She thanked you three times.”
I didn’t look up from my hexagon.
“And she said,” Dale went on, “that Katie’s going to put the quilt on the gift table at the wedding. So everybody can see the beautiful prize she won.”
My needle stopped.
I didn’t say anything. I put three more stitches in. Then I set it down.
“Dale,” I said. “Do you know anything about Pearl Wendt’s house? The heat?”
He looked surprised. “Why?”
“I drove by on Tuesday. All her windows have plastic on them. And there’s frost on the inside of the front one.”
Dale was quiet for a moment.
“That’s Howard Brenner’s duplex,” he said. “Out of Cedar Falls. He doesn’t fix anything. Folks say that furnace has been on its last legs for years.”
I picked up my needle again.
“Somebody should look at it,” I said.
Chapter Six: The Wedding
Katie Pfeiffer married Tyler Brandt on the second Saturday in June. At Grace Lutheran. With the reception afterward in the fellowship hall.
The same fellowship hall. The same folding tables. The same coffee urn.
We went, of course. Dale is her uncle. He wore his good suit and I wore my blue dress and we sat on the bride’s side, three rows back. Rhonda cried through the whole ceremony. Katie looked beautiful.
I want to say that clearly. She looked beautiful. She’s a sweet girl, Katie. She always has been. She used to follow me around my kitchen when she was little, asking to lick the beaters.
At the reception, the gift table was set up along the back wall. Right where the clothesline had been in October.
My quilt was on it.
Folded on top, with a little card propped in front of it, written in Rhonda’s curly handwriting.
Handmade Double Wedding Ring Quilt. Won by the bride at the Grace Lutheran Fall Raffle! Made by her Aunt Joan. A sign from above!
People stopped to look at it all evening. Women ran their fingers along the binding.
“Isn’t that the luckiest thing,” I heard Doris Engel say. “A wedding ring quilt, for a wedding.”
“I always say the Lord has a sense of humor,” somebody else said.
I stood by the punch bowl and smiled.
Across the room, I saw Pearl. She was sitting at a table by herself in the corner, in a flowered dress that must have been thirty years old. She had a piece of wedding cake in front of her. She hadn’t touched it.
She was looking at the gift table. At my quilt.
Then she looked away.
Halfway through the dancing, Katie found me by the punch bowl.
She was flushed and happy, with her veil off and her shoes in her hand. She hugged me hard.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the quilt. I’m going to keep it forever. I mean it.”
“I’m glad you like it, honey.”
She pulled back and looked at me. Something moved across her face. Just for a second.
“Aunt Joan,” she said, quieter. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She opened her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder. Rhonda was across the room, laughing with the Lutheran Women, looking our way.
Katie closed her mouth.
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’ll ask you sometime.”
She went back to the dance floor.
Dale drove us home that night. In the dark, with the window cracked.
“She knows,” he said, just past the Mueller place.
“Who?”
“Katie. She knows. I watched her face when she was talking to you.”
I looked out the window.
“Maybe,” I said.
I finished the Flower Garden in March. On the first warm day of the year, with the windows open for the first time since October.
I put in the last stitch of the binding at four-thirty on a Thursday afternoon. Then I took it out to the clothesline in the backyard and hung it up in the sunshine, the way my mother always did with a new quilt. Let the air through it. Let it breathe.
Dale came around the corner of the barn and stopped.
He stood there for a long time in his work boots, looking at it. Two thousand and four hexagons. Every flower a different color, every heart the same faded blue.
“Your mother’s dress,” he said finally.
“Yes.”
He walked over and put his hand flat on one of the blue centers. Gently. Like he was touching her.
“She’d have liked that,” he said.
Chapter Seven: The Storm Door
In April I folded it into a pillowcase.
A plain white one, ironed, from my linen closet. I folded the quilt in thirds and then in thirds again and slid it in carefully, the way you’d put a baby in a bassinet.
I drove to Pearl’s side of town on a Wednesday afternoon. Third Street. The little white duplex by the grain elevator.
The plastic was still on the windows. Grayer now, after a whole winter. Peeling at one corner.
Her storm door didn’t quite latch. I could see that from the sidewalk. It hung open about an inch, and the wind pushed it back and forth, so it tapped against the frame. Tap. Tap.
I went up the sagging porch steps. I stood there with the pillowcase under my arm.
My heart was going like I was walking into a job interview. I don’t know why. She was just an old woman. Just a widow from church.
I knocked.
I heard her coming. Slow. A shuffle, then a pause, then another shuffle. One hand along the wall. I could hear her fingers brushing the wallpaper.
The latch turned.
The inside door opened a few inches. Pearl looked out through the gap. She was wearing a gray cardigan buttoned wrong and two pairs of socks and the same navy coat she wore to church. Indoors.
The air that came out the door was cold. Not cool. Cold. Colder than the April afternoon outside.
“Joan Hartwig,” she said. She blinked at me. “Is something wrong? Is it Dale?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong. Can I come in, Pearl?”
She opened the door the rest of the way.
Her half of the duplex was small. A front room, a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom. Neat as a pin. A little television. A recliner with a crocheted afghan over the back. A picture of Vern on the wall, in his seed corn cap, squinting into the sun.
And a space heater. A little electric one, plugged in by the recliner, with its coils glowing orange. It was the only warm thing in the room.
“Pearl,” I said. “Is your furnace working?”
She looked embarrassed.
“It works some,” she said. “Some days. Mr. Brenner says he’ll get somebody out. He’s been saying it since Thanksgiving.” She waved her hand. “I’ve got my heater. And my coat. I’m fine.”
I didn’t argue. Not yet.
I held out the pillowcase.
“I made you something,” I said.
She looked at it. Then at me. She didn’t take it.
“Joan,” she said. “What is this?”
“Open it and see.”
She took it to the kitchen table. She set it down very carefully, like it might break. She untucked the end of the pillowcase.
She pulled out the corner of the quilt. Just the corner. Three flowers. A pink one, a yellow one, a lavender one. Each with a faded blue heart.
Her hands stopped.
She stood there at her kitchen table in her coat, holding the corner of that quilt. She didn’t move for a long time.
Then she pulled the rest of it out. Slowly. Unfolding it. She held it up against herself, the way Katie had held up the Double Wedding Ring at the raffle.
It went all the way down to the floor.
“This is new,” she whispered.
“Brand new,” I said. “Every stitch.”
“Who made it?”
“I did. This winter.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were very wet.
“For who?”
“For you, Pearl,” I said. “Only ever for you.”
Chapter Eight: What Pearl Saw
She sat down at her kitchen table with the quilt in her lap. She ran her hand over it, flower by flower. She touched every blue center like she was counting them.
“Joan,” she said. “Why?”
I didn’t know how to answer at first. I pulled out the other chair and sat down across from her.
“Because you bought sixty dollars of tickets,” I said. “In quarters. And you said you’d never owned a quilt somebody made new.”
She looked down at her hands.
“And because you didn’t win,” I said quietly. “And I didn’t think that was right.”
Pearl was quiet for a long time. The space heater ticked. Outside, a grain truck rumbled past toward the elevator.
“You know,” she said finally. “Don’t you? About the drawing.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.
“I was in the back row,” Pearl said. “I could see her hands. I’ve got good eyes for an old woman. Vern always said I could spot a weed in a bean field from the road.”
She looked up at me.
“She reached in her apron pocket,” Pearl said. “Before she reached in the can. Just for a second. Her right hand. Then into the can, and out.”
My breath stopped.
“I saw it,” Pearl said simply. “Plain as day.”
“Pearl,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something?”
She smiled. A small, tired smile.
“Who would I say it to? Rhonda? Pastor Dahl? The whole fellowship hall?” She shook her head. “I’m an eighty-one-year-old widow who rents half a house from a man in Cedar Falls. Rhonda’s been running that church kitchen for twenty years. Who do you think they’d believe?”
“I would have believed you.”
“I know you would,” she said. “I watched your face by the coffee urn. You smiled the way I smiled at Vern’s funeral.”
She folded her hands on top of the quilt.
“And if I’d said something,” she said, “then you’d have had to choose. You and Dale. Between his sister and the truth. In front of the whole church.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen a church split, Joan. In 1997. Over carpet. I wasn’t going to be the reason it happened again. Not over sixty dollars.”
“It wasn’t just sixty dollars, Pearl. I saw you at the Casey’s. With the cans.”
She went red. She looked away.
“Well,” she said. “It’s honest money.”
“That’s twelve hundred cans.”
“Fourteen hundred,” she said. “Some of them were bottles. Those are bigger.” She almost laughed. “And I didn’t buy those tickets to win, Joan. Not really. I bought them for the furnace.”
I didn’t understand.
“The church furnace,” Pearl said. “You know where I go on Wednesday afternoons? When it’s cold?”
I shook my head.
“The church,” she said. “The fellowship hall. I go sit in there and read. Pastor Dahl leaves the side door unlocked for me. He knows. He’s the only one who knows.” She looked at her space heater. “It’s warmer than here. When the church furnace works.”
She smoothed the quilt over her knees.
“Last January it quit,” she said. “During the Christmas program. And I thought, if it goes, I lose my Wednesdays. So I bought sixty dollars of tickets. For the furnace.” She smiled. “The quilt was just a bonus. A dream. I didn’t really think I’d win it.”
Chapter Nine: Katie
I stayed at Pearl’s for two hours that afternoon. She made coffee on her stove, which still worked, thank God. We drank it at her kitchen table with the Flower Garden spread across both of our laps.
She told me about Vern. How they met at a barn dance in Tripoli in 1961. How he proposed in a hayloft. How he always wore that seed corn cap, even to church, until the pastor made him take it off.
I told her about my mother. About the treadle machine and the coffee cans of scraps. About the blue housedress.
“Every heart,” Pearl said, touching a blue center. “Every single one.”
“Every one,” I said.
“So your mother’s in every flower.”
I couldn’t answer. I just nodded.
When I left, I made her promise she’d call Dale if the furnace went out again. She promised. I didn’t believe her.
I drove home and found Dale in the machine shed, working on the baler. I told him about the cold. About the frost on the inside of the window. About the space heater.
He put down his wrench.
“How old’s that furnace?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Pearl said Mr. Brenner bought the duplex in 1994. It was there before that.”
Dale wiped his hands on a rag. He was quiet for a long time.
“I know a guy at Kaufman’s,” he said.
But before Dale could call Kaufman’s, someone knocked on our door.
It was a Saturday morning, three days later. I was in the kitchen making bread. Dale was out with the cows. I wiped my hands on my apron and opened the door.
Katie was standing on our porch.
She was holding a big plastic tub. The kind you keep sweaters in. And inside it, folded, was my Double Wedding Ring.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Can I come in?”
I let her in. She set the tub on the kitchen table. She didn’t sit down.
She was crying already. Not loud. Just tears running down her face that she kept wiping away with the back of her hand.
“I found the stub,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“In Mom’s apron,” she said. “The orange one she wore at the supper. She asked me to wash it last week, because she was helping me move into our new apartment and didn’t have time.” She took a breath. “I went through the pockets. Like you’re supposed to. And there it was. A raffle ticket. Folded up small. With my name on it.”
She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a little stub. Red. Folded in quarters.
She set it on the table next to the tub.
“It wasn’t the one she drew,” Katie said. “That one she gave to me. I’ve got it in my wedding scrapbook. This was a second one. Like a spare.” Her voice broke. “In case the first one fell out of her hand or something.”
I sat down. I picked up the stub and unfolded it.
Katie Pfeiffer. In Rhonda’s curly handwriting.
“I knew,” Katie said. “Aunt Joan, I think I knew the whole time. When she said my name. She didn’t shake the can. Everybody always shakes the can.” She wiped her eyes. “I wanted to say something at the wedding. When you were by the punch bowl. But I couldn’t. Not with her right there. Not on my wedding day.”
“I know, honey.”
“Did you know?”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I thought.”
She looked at the quilt in the plastic tub.
“I can’t keep it,” she said. “I can’t sleep under it. Tyler asked me why I keep folding it up and putting it in the closet. I told him I was afraid of getting it dirty.” She laughed through her tears. “That’s not why.”
She pushed the tub across the table toward me.
“I want to give it back,” she said. “Or give it to someone. Or put it in the raffle again. I don’t know. I just want to make it right.”
I looked at my niece. Twenty-three years old. Married eight weeks.
“Have you talked to your mother?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I’m scared to,” she said. “She’ll cry. She always cries. And then I’ll end up apologizing to her.”
Chapter Ten: Rhonda
Rhonda came on Monday.
I heard her car in the driveway at nine in the morning. Her white Buick, with the bumper sticker that says Proud Grandma of an Honor Student, even though she doesn’t have grandchildren yet. The car door slammed so hard I heard it in the kitchen.
She didn’t knock. She came right in the back door. Family does that.
She was holding a plastic tub. The same plastic tub. With my quilt in it.
“What did you say to her?” Rhonda said.
No hello. No good morning. She set the tub on my kitchen table so hard the salt shaker jumped.
“I didn’t say anything to her, Rhonda. She came to me.”
“She came to you with this.” She pointed at the tub. “And then you sent her home with it? And she comes to my house in tears and gives it to me and says she can’t keep it? Says she found something in my apron?”
“She did find something.”
“She found nothing!” Rhonda’s voice cracked. “A spare ticket! I wrote her name on an extra one because I was going to give it to her as a keepsake! For her scrapbook!”
I didn’t argue with her.
I’d learned that from Pearl. You don’t fix a crooked seam by yanking on it. You pick it out slow, one stitch at a time.
“Rhonda,” I said. “Sit down. I’ll make coffee.”
“I don’t want coffee.”
“Sit down anyway.”
She stood there for a second, breathing hard. Then she sat. Right in Dale’s chair, at the head of the table. She always does that.
I made coffee. I set a cup in front of her. Two sugars and a splash of milk. She looked at it.
“You remember how I take it,” she said.
“Thirty-one years, Rhonda.”
I sat down across from her. I didn’t say anything. I let the quiet sit there.
It sat there a long time.
Rhonda picked up her cup. She held it with both hands. She didn’t drink.
“Mom never made me a quilt,” she said finally.
I looked at her.
“Did you know that?” She was looking at her coffee. “Dale’s and my mother. Viola. She made a quilt for every one of the grandkids. Every wedding. Every baby. She made one for Dale when he went to college. She made two for you.”
“I know.”
“She never made one for me,” Rhonda said. “Not one. Not for my wedding. Not for Katie when she was born. I asked her once. She said I’d only ruin it.”
I didn’t know that. In thirty-one years, I never knew that.
“She gave her quilts to you,” Rhonda said. “Her daughter-in-law. Not her daughter. She said you were the only one in the family who knew what they were worth.” She laughed, short and bitter. “When she died, she left you her quilting frame. And her patterns. And all her scraps. And me she left a set of Corelle dishes.”
“Rhonda…”
“So when you made that quilt for the raffle,” she said, “and hung it up on that wall, and everybody was standing around touching it, saying it was the prettiest thing they’d ever seen…” Her voice broke. “I just thought, that’s one more. One more quilt in this family that’ll never be for anybody of mine.”
She put her cup down. Her hands were shaking.
“I wrote her name on two tickets before the supper,” she said. “I put one in my apron. And when I reached in the can, I just held on to it.” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. Like my hand decided.”
Tears were running down her face now. Real ones. Not the ones she cries at funerals.
“And then I stood up there and said the Lord works in mysterious ways.” She shook her head. “In His own church. With the microphone.”
She put her face in her hands.
“And now my daughter won’t look at me,” she said through her fingers. “She says she can’t sleep under it. She says every time she sees it, she thinks of Pearl Wendt clapping from the back row.”
I reached across the table. I put my hand on her arm.
I’d been angry at Rhonda for eight months. I’d scrubbed the top of the refrigerator over Rhonda. I’d spent a whole winter sewing two thousand and four hexagons because of Rhonda.
But sitting at my kitchen table, crying into her coffee, she didn’t look like a cheat. She looked like a little girl who’d asked her mother for a quilt and been told she’d only ruin it.
“Rhonda,” I said. “What do you want to do?”
She lifted her face. Her mascara was running.
“I want to make it right,” she said. “I just don’t know how. Not without everybody knowing. Not without the whole church…”
“Then let’s think about it,” I said. “Together.”
Chapter Eleven: Making It Right
We sat at my kitchen table for three hours that morning. Rhonda and me.
Dale came in from chores at eleven. He stopped in the doorway when he saw us. He looked at the tub on the table. At his sister’s face. At mine.
He didn’t say a word. He just poured himself a cup of coffee and went to the front room and turned on the farm report.
Here’s what we decided.
First, Rhonda would go see Pastor Dahl. Privately. And tell him the truth. All of it. She was scared to death, but she agreed. Pastor Dahl has been at Grace Lutheran for sixteen years. He’s buried most of our parents. He keeps things to himself.
Second, Rhonda would give back what the raffle cost Pearl. Not sixty dollars. More. She’d pay Pearl’s sixty out of her own pocket, and then match every dollar of it to the furnace fund.
Third, the Double Wedding Ring would go back in the raffle. At the fall supper. This October. And this time, somebody else would draw.
“Who?” Rhonda asked. “Who draws?”
I thought about it.
“Pearl,” I said.
Rhonda looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded slowly.
“Pearl,” she agreed.
Rhonda saw Pastor Dahl on Wednesday. She told him everything. She told me afterward that he listened without saying a single word, and when she was done, he took off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie.
“Rhonda,” he said, “I’ve been a pastor for thirty-one years. I’ve heard people confess things that would curl your hair. Robbing banks. Leaving spouses. You know what’s the hardest thing to confess?”
She shook her head.
“The small ones,” he said. “Because we tell ourselves they don’t count.”
He didn’t make her stand up in church. He didn’t tell the council. He said that what was between Rhonda and God was between Rhonda and God.
But he did one thing. He called Kaufman’s Heating himself, that afternoon.
Pearl’s furnace got replaced the second week of May.
Dale’s friend from Kaufman’s came out to look at it. A man named Gary Lutz, who’s been fixing furnaces in Bremer County for forty years. He took one look at the old unit in Pearl’s basement and shook his head.
“Cracked heat exchanger,” he said. “This thing’s been leaking carbon monoxide. Probably for a couple years. It’s a miracle she’s still alive.”
Pearl, standing on the basement stairs in her coat, went white.
Howard Brenner, the landlord in Cedar Falls, didn’t want to pay for a new one. Gary told him what Iowa law says about landlords and furnaces and carbon monoxide. Then Pastor Dahl called him too. Then Dale did.
Then I sat down at my kitchen table with the county assessor’s website and Pearl’s lease and the phone number for Legal Aid in Waterloo. I keep books. I know how to find the wrong number.
Howard Brenner paid for the furnace. Four thousand, one hundred and seventy dollars. Installed in two days.
And while we were at it, I helped Pearl fill out the application for the Iowa energy assistance program. She’d never heard of it. She qualified for help with her heating bills every winter. She’d been eligible since Vern died.
Nine years of winters in her coat. And nobody ever told her.
The church furnace got its money too.
Rhonda wrote a check to the furnace fund for sixty dollars, and then another for six hundred. She said it was ten for every one. She never told anybody why. She just put it in the offering plate in an envelope with no name on it.
But the furnace fund was still short. Kaufman’s needed the money by June first, or the price would go up.
Pastor Dahl announced it at church on the last Sunday in May. Five thousand, two hundred dollars still to go.
The next Sunday, there was an envelope in the offering plate. A plain white one, with no name.
Inside was a cashier’s check from the Bremer County Bank for five thousand, two hundred dollars.
Nobody ever found out who it was from. Pastor Dahl wouldn’t say.
But when I looked over at Rhonda in her pew that morning, she was looking straight ahead at the altar with her chin up. And Dale, sitting next to me, squeezed my hand.
Rhonda had cashed in a CD. I found out years later. The one her mother left her. The money that came with the Corelle dishes.
Chapter Twelve: The Can
The fall supper was the second Saturday in October again. A year to the day.
Same fellowship hall. Same folding tables. Same coffee urn. Same meatloaf and scalloped corn and seven kinds of pie.
The new furnace was running in the basement. You could hear it hum. For the first time in sixty-four years, the fellowship hall was warm in October without anybody having to start it with a prayer.
The Double Wedding Ring hung on the clothesline again. Right where it had been.
People came up to touch it, just like before. Some of them gave me looks. Little sideways looks, like they wanted to ask something and didn’t know how.
Katie stood next to it most of the evening. She told anybody who asked that she’d decided to give it back to the raffle. “It belongs to the church,” she said. “I want somebody else to have a chance.”
Tyler stood next to her with his arm around her. He didn’t ask why.
Rhonda sold the tickets again. At the card table by the door. Two dollars a ticket, three for five.
When Pearl came to the table, Rhonda looked up at her for a long time.
Pearl was wearing a new coat. A red wool one. I’d bought it for her at the Younkers in Waterloo in September, and she’d argued with me for twenty minutes in the parking lot about it. She’d lost.
Pearl opened her cloth coin purse.
Rhonda put her hand over it.
“Not this year, Pearl,” Rhonda said quietly. “This year, your tickets are on me.”
She tore off a long strip of tickets. She didn’t count them. She folded them carefully and put them in Pearl’s hand.
Pearl looked at her. Rhonda looked back.
Neither one said anything. They didn’t need to.
After the pie, Rhonda stood up at the little podium at the front of the fellowship hall. She had the red Folgers can in her hand. The same can.
She didn’t take the microphone this time. She just stood there.
“Before we draw,” she said, and her voice was shaking a little, “I want to ask somebody else to do it this year. I’ve been doing it for eleven years. It’s time somebody else had a turn.”
She looked toward the back row.
“Pearl,” she said. “Would you come up?”
The room went quiet.
Pearl stood up slowly. She came up the center aisle between the folding tables in her new red coat. One hand on the backs of the chairs, the way she walks along her walls at home.
When she got to the podium, Rhonda handed her the can.
Pearl held it for a moment. She looked down into it. Five hundred and some stubs, folded small.
Then she looked straight back at me. By the coffee urn. With a dish towel on my shoulder.
Pearl lifted that Folgers can over her head. As high as an eighty-two-year-old woman can lift anything.
And she shook it.
She shook it hard. Like she was mixing paint. Like Ruth Kessler used to do. Like she was shaking a whole year out of it.
The stubs rattled and rattled inside that can. Somebody in the back laughed. Then somebody else. Then the whole fellowship hall was laughing and clapping while an eighty-two-year-old widow in a red coat shook a coffee can over her head for a full fifteen seconds.
Then she closed her eyes. And she reached in.
She unfolded the stub. She held it out at arm’s length, because she’d left her reading glasses on the table.
“Well,” she said. “Would you look at that.”
She read the name out loud.
“Lisa Kowalski.”
Nobody knew who that was.
Then, at the very back table, a young woman stood up. She was maybe twenty-five, with a baby on her hip and a toddler holding on to her jeans. She’d moved to Belden in August. Her husband worked nights at the ethanol plant. She’d come to the supper because she saw the sign at the Casey’s and couldn’t afford to cook that night.
She’d bought one ticket. Two dollars.
She stood there with her baby, her mouth open, staring at the quilt on the wall.
“Me?” she said. “Really?”
“Really,” Pearl said. “Come on up, honey. It’s yours.”
The whole room clapped. Really clapped this time. Not the polite kind.
Lisa Kowalski came up the aisle with her baby on her hip. Katie took down the quilt from the clothesline and folded it and put it in her arms. Lisa started crying. Then Katie started crying. Then Rhonda.
Then me, by the coffee urn. I couldn’t help it.
When it was all over, and the tables were folded and the coffee urn was empty and the furnace was humming in the basement, Katie found me in the church kitchen.
I was washing cups. She picked up a dish towel and started drying.
“Aunt Joan,” she said. “Will you teach me?”
“Teach you what, honey?”
“To quilt,” she said. “I want to learn. The real way. By hand.”
I turned off the water. I dried my hands on my apron.
Then I reached up to the windowsill above the sink, where I’d set my mother’s silver thimble while I washed. Worn thin on top. From her forty years, and my thirty.
I held it out to Katie.
She looked at it. Then at me.
“Your mother’s thimble?”
“It’s yours now,” I said. “If you want it. It’s a family thimble. And you’re family.”
She took it. She slid it onto her middle finger. It fit.
That was three years ago.
Katie comes out to the farm every Tuesday night. She sits in the rocker by the woodstove, and I sit in Dale’s chair, and we sew. She’s made two quilts so far. A simple Nine Patch and a Log Cabin. Her stitches are crooked. Seven to the inch, maybe six.
She’ll get there. I didn’t get to ten until I was forty.
Rhonda comes sometimes too. She doesn’t sew. She just sits with us and drinks coffee and tells stories about her mother. Some of them are even nice.
Pearl died last winter, in January. Eighty-four years old. In her sleep, in her bed, in the east half of the little white duplex on Third Street.
The house was warm when they found her. The new furnace was running. And she was lying under the Grandmother’s Flower Garden. Two thousand and four hexagons. Every heart the same faded blue.
The coroner said she looked peaceful. Like she’d just decided to take a rest.
At her funeral, Grace Lutheran was full. Every pew. People standing in the back. Men from the elevator, women from the Lutheran Women, the man from Kaufman’s, Lisa Kowalski with her two little ones.
Rhonda did the funeral lunch. Ham sandwiches, scalloped corn, seven kinds of bars. She didn’t sit down once. When I tried to help her, she shooed me out of the kitchen.
“Go sit with Dale,” she said. “This one’s mine.”
Pearl had no family left. No children. No nieces or nephews. Just a note in her nightstand drawer, in shaky handwriting, addressed to Pastor Dahl.
Bury me with Vern in the Tripoli cemetery. Give my good dishes to the church kitchen. And please give the quilt back to Joan Hartwig. She’ll know who needs it next.
It’s in my cedar chest now. Folded in thirds, and then in thirds again, in a plain white pillowcase.
I don’t know who it’s for yet. I’m waiting.
But on Tuesday nights, when Katie and I are sewing by the woodstove and Dale’s asleep in his chair, I sometimes get up and open that chest. And I unfold just the corner. Three flowers. A pink one, a yellow one, a lavender one.
Each with a faded blue heart.
I touch them, one at a time.
Then I fold it back up and close the lid. And I go back to my rocker. And I pick up my needle, and I watch my niece push hers through the cotton with my mother’s thimble on her finger.
And I don’t say anything at all.
There’s nothing that needs saying. It’s all in the stitches. Every one a little wish for whoever’s going to need it next.
