PATCHWORK

Through the window over the kitchen sink, I can see the stars coming out in the darkening sky above the violet July sunset--a much prettier sight than the one I face inside. Lee and I are elbow-deep in hot water, washing a lazy-weekend mountain of sticky plates and crusty pots – our Sunday night ritual.

Lee playfully bumps me with his shoulder. “So tell me again how you swallowed that watermelon whole,” he says, grinning, holding out his wet arms to indicate the size of my belly. I laugh, and threaten him with a handful of juicy soapsuds. We scuffle, puffs of foam flying in all directions.

Just then, the phone rings and I run to answer, barely escaping Lee's next handful of bubbles. Laughing, I say hello.

It's Dad calling long distance. “What's wrong?” I ask, knowing from the sound of his voice that he is upset. There is a long pause, and then he tells me.

“Oh, no.” I glance at Lee. He is wiping his hands on a white dish towel, watching me, concern erasing his smile.

“But how could that happen?” I carry the phone to the kitchen table and sit down. Lee comes over and puts his hand on my shoulder. I shake my head at him, and listen in silence. “Well,” I say at last, “you've done all you can do.” I hear Dad sigh, and then he asks about me. “Yes,” I say, “I'm being careful...the baby's fine...just one more month.” I pat my huge belly. “Bonnie, our midwife says everything is going great.

“Yes, I know you worry, Dad, but having a home birth is safe...you know we've planned everything carefully. The hospital's only five minutes away . . . if we have any trouble we'll just go to the hospital. And Mom will be here,” I add, trying to make my voice sound glad. “Okay, I will . . . you too, Dad . . . I love you too.”

I hang up the phone, slowly, quietly. I look up at Lee, see the questions in his gray eyes, the small bit of soap foam sticking in his tousled brown hair. My eyes cling to his for a long moment. Then, as if for assurance, I curl my fingers in, making tight fists around them, before I tell him about my paternal grandmother.

“Mimi's in the hospital. She's okay now, but . . . ” My voice catches. “There was an accident at the nursing home. Part of her finger was cut off . . . the middle finger of her left hand . . . down to the first knuckle.”

Lee sits down in the other chair, limp. “How?” he asks.

“Dad says they think it must have gotten caught in the mechanism that raises and lowers her bed . . . that they forgot to check where her hands were before they operated it.” I stare at the table, its wood grain blurs out of focus. “But they won't say who did it.”

Lee slams his hand down on the table, making me jump. “What's your Dad doing about it?”

Tears sting my eyes. “He's going to see his lawyer tomorrow, to get the nursing home to pay for the hospital bills, and to get Mimi moved.”

Lee scrapes his chair back. “Well, I think they should pay more than just the hospital bills.” At the sink, he crashes the dishes around. Water splashes out onto the white and yellow linoleum. “There's no excuse for something like that.”

No kidding. I run out and lock myself in the bathroom. Grabbing a handful of tissues to wipe my eyes, I sit on the flat cold edge of the bathtub and look at the place where the wallpaper is curling away from the wall above the heater. I look up at the corners of the ceiling where spidery gray mildew spots creep across the white surface.

Then, I look down at my hands and instead see Mimi's hands – I remember them so well. They were knobby, wrinkled, spotted with brown, always working, kneading cookie dough, planting zinnias or wild columbine, pushing fabric through the old black sewing machine, hugging me breathless.

I think of a time four years ago, before Mimi broke her hip and forgot how to walk. We sat outside, she and I, in kitchen chairs on the big side porch of the stone house where I grew up, where my father had grown up before me. Her white hair that had always been carefully permed, now stood out straight in the warm still air. She murmured softly to herself while I filed her finger nails and painted on her favorite pearl frost polish.

Now one of those fingers was gone. I wonder if she cried out when it happened, or if her large dark eyes had gone silently round with pain, her mouth dropped down slack with shock – a voiceless cry.

I feel sick. I don't care about suing the nursing home; all I can see in my mind is her face, her eyes. Only her eyes speak for her now.

For the past four years, on my visits home, I've been shocked anew each time by the changes in Mimi. For my parents, the changes have been gradual, a film they have watched from the beginning. But I see only stills, each taken a year apart: Mimi slumped on the couch clutching her favorite jewelry in a worn lace handkerchief, Mimi in a wheelchair at Christmas dinner, Mimi bedridden in the dark back room, Mimi in the bright sterile glare of the nursing home, holding spoon-fed green beans behind clenched teeth, forgetting to swallow.

Suddenly I remember something I wrote on my visit home two years ago. Holding my heavy middle, I get up and come quietly out of the bathroom to look for my journal. I no longer hear water running in the kitchen as I slip across the hall to the second bedroom in our house, my workroom.

In the morning, this room will be light-filled from the big windows, but now it is dark and I can see out to the deep blue night sky, the black silhouettes of the tomato plants in our garden, the golden squares of light falling across the lawn from the house next-door. When I flip on the light, I'm reassured by the sight of my sewing tools, the big table, my sewing machine, all poised for work.

An old blue cupboard with worn edges stands open against the far wall. Its bottom drawers hold Mimi's old candy tins full of ribbons, laces, quilt bindings and buttons. Above, on the shelves, are my fabrics. I touch them now, lovingly stroking their soft folded edges, drinking in through my fingertips the vibrant energy of their rich colors, dark and light, their bold and delicate patterns. It was Mimi who awakened this love in me, who taught me of the art in quilting.

Lee comes in and stands behind me, up against me, barely touching. He smoothes my hair down the back of my neck with both hands. “Beth,” he says softly against my head, “I'm sorry about Mimi.”

I lean back into him. “I know,” I say.

“Come out and sit on the porch with me, look at the stars.” He kisses my neck, his hands slip around my belly, rubbing the knobby baby-parts that stick out.

I lay my hands over his, light over tan, and nod. “There's something I want to find first. I'll be out soon.”

He gives me a squeeze and goes out leaving a coolness at my back where the warmth had been. I hear the front door open and close with a sigh against the hot night air.

I take a small spiral notebook down from the bookshelves next to the blue cupboard. My journal. Turning, I catch sight of the graph paper and colored pencils I had laid out earlier. “Tomorrow, I'll start your crib quilt,” I whisper as I pat the taut round place in my side that is my baby's bottom. Then I take my journal into the bedroom.

I ignore the tangled sheets on the bed, unmade all day. Easing down into the rocking chair beside our tall dresser, I start flipping pages. At last, I find what I want:

“May 28:

“I have to write this because I can't talk about it yet, not even to Lee. It's too hard. I saw Mimi today, and it has broken my heart. Mom warned me, but I didn't believe she could change so much. She is no longer my Mimi. Now she is a strange old woman in a rented hospital bed in the dark back room, with frail skin clinging to thin bone and so much sadness in her eyes that I could hardly look at her. Her hands were tied to the bed rails so she couldn't hurt herself, and the air was heavy with the smell of urine.

“I would have hugged her, but there were the tubes and restraints, and I was afraid of her – of the way her mouth hung open. She seemed to know me, though Dad said she wouldn't. She clung to my hand when I had to leave and whispered, 'Don't go.' But I gave her a kiss and hurried away, the feel of her cheek lingering on my face like soft crumpled paper.”

I close the journal, lean back and shut my eyes. I realize now that “Don't go” were the last words I ever heard her say. By the next time I saw her, she had forgotten how to talk.

Alzheimer's disease. I hate what it has done to her. It robbed us of her before we knew what was happening, as if the last copy of some rare and precious book, thought to be safe upon the shelf, was suddenly found with all the pages rotted out – an empty shell that no one can ever read again.

So much I never asked her about herself, her childhood; so much I now wish I knew. I never imagined a time when her memories would be lost to me, when she wouldn't even know me. I never imagined so active a mind could die.

I push further back in memory, back to the times when my parents were young and I was a child, and we lived with Mimi and Pop in the big stone house. I remember happy times; running barefoot over the wide cracked sidewalks as if I had wings, catching fireflies on summer nights in grass stained gold with light from open windows, the Sunday dinners that filled the dining room with laughing family and delicious smells.

And I remember too the sparks of trouble that kindled often between my parents back then. I felt it smoldering in silences, heard it igniting in angry voices muffled by blankets on dark tear-filled nights – sounds that made my face burn, sounds that scorched my heart.

But Mimi was always there, a refuge of comfort. Barely five feet tall, she was a tower of will, she ran the household, and she was my friend.

As a child, I loved to make her laugh. She would laugh so hard that no sound came out, her breath coming in gasps while tears rolled down her cheeks. And I loved the long walks we took on warm velvet nights, Mimi bouncing along beside me, her arm tucked through mine, her size four feet taking two steps to every one of mine.

And as I grew up, I found that I could talk to her about anything. She listened to my rock music, giggled with me over letters from boyfriends, and seriously discussed my ideas and dreams while my parents were too entrenched in their own wars with life and each other. She was the only person I knew for whom I could do no wrong.

I hear the whisper of the front door opening, Lee calls softly, “Beth?” I wipe my wet face on the ample hem of my maternity blouse and go out to the warmth of Lee's arms, to the comforting vastness of a star-filled sky.

* * * * * * *

The morning sunlight streams through the big windows in my workroom, forming perfect squares of white heat on my table. On graph paper, I plot a rectangle, the outside edge of the crib quilt. Next, I draw an inner line to mark off the border. There should be hearts on it, I think, and stars. For last night, for Lee, there must be stars on our baby's quilt.

The doorbell rings. When I open the door, a huge box is on the porch. A brown-suited delivery man is climbing into his truck. “Hey!” I yell. “How am I supposed to get this in the house?” But he is already shifting gears and pulling away. I shove the box and find it's too heavy to move. My mother's handwriting slants across the label.

Getting a knife from the kitchen, I slit the lid open out on the porch. Sheets of scented lilac paper lie under the top flaps.

“Dear Beth,” I read. “Your father and I are making room in our attic for some things from Mimi's house. This is a box of yours I found up there. It all looked like junk to me, but I knew you would want to decide for yourself what to throw away.”

I skim over the next several sentences of her concerns about the home birth, then: “Guess who I ran into this week? Frank Harding! He's doing very well – just bought a new house in Belle Heights. He asked all about you. Did you know he's still single?”

I crush the letter into a tight wad and walk inside to the kitchen garbage can. On second thought, I smooth it out and scan the rest. I find her flight schedule and copy it down on the calendar over the phone. She will be here in two weeks. Then, I rip the letter up, letting the pieces flutter down into the garbage. I don't care to know the activities of the man my mother thinks I should have married.

Back on the porch, I begin unpacking the box. Mostly it is full of relics from my high school years, some scandalously short skirts, a worn poetry text, my senior yearbook, a Beatles poster, two jigsaw puzzles, a collection of rocks in an egg carton.

Suddenly, at the bottom, I catch a glimpse of patchwork that makes my heart jump. Memory floods back. How could I have forgotten?

Digging down, I slowly pull up the first quilt I ever made. Mimi helped me make it when I was eleven. We made it out of familiar fabrics, my baby clothes, old dresses. Mimi called it a memory quilt.

As I take it out of the box, my excitement turns to alarm. Where the sides and corners of the quilt were folded together, they are chewed and ragged. A rank odor hits me, unmistakable. Mice. They have chewed holes through the patchwork to nest in the soft batting, filling my quilt with their sharp smell.

I drape the quilt over the box and sit down on the chill concrete steps. Out in the yard, grass and dandelions stand tall in the hot sun, deep pools of shade lie under the maple trees. I think of a word that describes my quilt. Vandalized. And I realize it is a word that somehow describes Mimi as well.

I imagine myself with the quilt, undamaged, going to see Mimi in the nursing home. I imagine that she recognizes it as I lay it on her lap, that she reaches out, strokes it with her hands, touching, grasping the memories in each square of fabric, remembering all these pieces of our lives, remembering me.

I look into her eyes and feel pain at the thought of her spirit imprisoned in that useless body. A tear slips down her cheek – or is it mine? I want to hug her, so in my mind, I do. And I know, as I hold her tightly, as we rock together in my thoughts, that soon she will be gone. Someday soon, I will have to let her go.

With a heavy sigh, I stand up and shake the quilt out over the grass. I don't want to carry mouse droppings into the house. Then, at a sudden thought, I have to smile a little. I wonder if my immaculate mother knows she has mice in her attic.

I hug Lee when he comes home; his tie is loose, his shirt back cold and wet from the hot vinyl car seat. I show him the quilt on my worktable. He drapes a damp arm over my shoulder. “Well,” he says, wrinkling up his nose, “can't you cut off the edges and refinish the middle part?”

“Maybe.” I'm reluctant. Even damaged, the flowing dark and light patterns arranged by Mimi's skillful hands are vibrant. It seems sacred, inviolable – how can I just cut it apart?

“Hey!” I say suddenly, as my eye catches a certain pink square in the center of the quilt. “Do you know what this used to be? My baby blanket, the one Mom could never get away from me even to wash.” We laugh. Lee kisses me, pats the baby through my belly, and goes to change clothes.

I touch the worn, still fuzzy pink square, then look over at the unfinished crib quilt design. All at once I know what I will do. I take a deep breath and get my scissors. After trimming away the damaged edges and some careful washing, I plan to add a new border, one with hearts and stars on it. The work will be tedious, but I won't mind. It will a labor of love.

* * * * * * *

Lee and I are sitting at the dinner table. He has just finished mowing the lawn, and I am sitting with my chin in my hands, exhausted from two days of major housecleaning, watching him eat. My due date is only a week away. Mom will arrive tomorrow to stay for three weeks, but I want to call her and tell her not to come.

“I'm not sure I want Mom to come,” I say, trying to sound casual. I hope Lee will agree at once, tell me to call her, cancel the trip.

He suspends a fork full of mashed potatoes long enough to give me an incredulous look. “Why?”

Annoyance creeps into my throat. I don't want to have to explain this. “She's so critical of everything,” I say. “I just don't want that kind of energy around while I'm in labor.”

“Honey, she'll be crushed if you tell her you don't want her. You know how excited she is about the baby.” He pats my arm. “She won't be so worried about the home-birth once she gets here and talks to Bonnie.” He takes a bite of chicken. “And you'll need her help – you know I can only take two days off.”

I shake my head. He's right, but I don't like it. “She keeps writing to me about Frank.” Instantly, I regret saying it.

His eyes darken and I hear a hard edge in his voice. “Beth, if she says things that bother you, you should tell her.”

“Doesn't it bother you too?”

“That's not the point. You can't use my feelings as an excuse and hide your own anger.” He sighs and his voice softens. “Beth, honey, you always tell me when she makes you angry, but you never tell her.” He eats his last bite of chicken and stands up. “I still need to water the garden.” He gives me a kiss on top of my head and leaves me to stare at my cold dinner.

* * * * * * *

When I pick Mom up at the airport, she is shocked that I am alone, that I have driven the car in my condition. I think, as I watch her bustling about retrieving her luggage, flagging down a skycap (she won't let me carry even the smallest bag), that she hasn't changed, hasn't even aged since I last saw her.

In the car she tells me that the nursing home settled out of court, that Mimi is now in a new home, and that Dad's real estate company has just expanded. “And how is Lee's job?” she asks, and I imagine she is wondering if he has gotten a raise.

“Oh, just fine,” I lie. This is the first summer that Lee has had to teach summer school – remedial math to seventh and eighth graders – -because we needed the extra money.

“By the way,” she says, “in a few months we'll have Mimi's house cleaned out and fixed up; we wondered if you and Lee might move back home. You could live there rent free.”

I picture Mimi's house – the winding stairs up to the dormer bedrooms, the big kitchen with the huge pantry, two bathrooms, the mazes of mysterious closets where Dad and I played hide-and-seek, the small fenced back yard with Mimi's treasured wildflower gardens. We would have lots of space there. “We'll talk about it,” I tell her. But inside, a part of me is saying, no way. I have my own life now.

When we get to the house, Mom takes her usual silent tour of all the rooms. She stops at my workroom. “Where's the nursery?” she asks, panic in her voice.

“We're going to move the furniture around in our bedroom and put the crib in there,” I say.

“Does Lee know about that?” she whispers, as if Lee might hear her downtown at the school.

“Of course, Mom. He wants the baby in there. If it cries, he'll get up and bring it to me to nurse.”

She looks at me with disbelief. “If Lee's anything like your father, that won't last more than one night.”

At dinner, she tells Lee the story of how, when I was born, I was so small that she was afraid to hold me. I stir my soup silently as they laugh. I know that she is still afraid.

Later, Lee pushes the tall dresser from our bedroom into the hall. Then, Mom and I fill the changing table by the bathroom door with stacks of tiny diapers and sweet-smelling baby clothes, while Lee is in our bedroom struggling with bolts and casters, putting the crib together. When it is done, Mom makes it up with teddy bear sheets, and Lee helps me hang a mobile of stuffed patchwork stars that I made. Then I stand back smiling, my arm around Lee. Everything is ready. It's a little cramped, but I am pleased. Mom just shakes her head.

* * * * * * *

For the next three days, my mother cleans, and recleans, the house. There is never a dirty dish for more than five minutes. She vacuums the floors I've already vacuumed; she waxes the furniture all over again. She scrubs at the stains on the kitchen linoleum, and takes a toothbrush to the ancient mildew on the bathroom ceiling.

Through it all, I smolder with anger, saying nothing. But when she brings the bucket of Lysol into the bedroom and starts to wash down the walls, I explode. “Mom!” I yell. “That's enough! I had already cleaned the house enough before you got here!”

She sits back on her heels, squeezes pungent liquid out of her sponge, and gives me a look. “Don't yell at me, Beth. Don't things have to be clean for the birth?”

“Clean, yes, not sterilized!”

She scrubs in silence for a minute, her back to me. Then she says, “I would think you would appreciate the help.”

“This isn't help – it's barely concealed criticism,” I say, suddenly letting go, finding words I’ve never spoken. “Nothing I ever do is good enough for you – not my cleaning, not even my marriage.” My ears are burning with the shock of hearing myself say these things to her at last, but I can't stop now. “I know what you think of Lee.”

“That's not true,” she says. “And as for Lee, I just hate to see you living like this, having so little.” She waves a yellow-gloved hand around at the house.

I assume this is another reference to Frank. “I think we're doing just fine,” I say coldly.

“Well, you could have done better.”

I grit my teeth against the ice in my voice. “Mom,” I say, “you have mice in your attic.” Then I stomp out to my workroom and slam the door behind me.

At the window, I stand looking out over the garden striped with long late-afternoon tree shadows. Lee will be home soon. I think back to the first time Lee and I made love. We hadn't officially talked about marriage yet, but there in bed, with the room lit by pale windowpanes of moonlight on the dark floor, skin soft on skin, he lay with me and prayed. Whispering straight from his heart, he prayed out loud for our bonding, our future together.

I was moved to tears, not just because of the feelings he expressed, but because he dared to share them out loud. I held him so tight, my heart hushed, letting his words fill all my empty inner places. I knew then that I would marry him – even more, that in the truest sense, our marriage began in that moment, and I knew that he knew it too.

And I wonder why my mother doesn't understand something like that – something so special that nothing else matters – certainly not how much money we have.

* * * * * * *

That night, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. feeling funny. I hear Mom jump up from the sofa bed when I go into the bathroom. We haven't said much to each other all evening, but she is out there now, tapping on the door, calling, “Beth, are you all right?”

“I think this is it,” I say. “I'm having contractions.” I hear Lee's footsteps now in the hall.

“Don't we need to call Bonnie?” asks Mom. She sounds panicked again.

I hear Lee's quiet laugh. “No,” he says. “Not yet.”

We time contractions for the rest of the night, calling Bonnie early in the morning when they are five minutes apart. Bonnie arrives wearing a white blouse and a peasant skirt, her hair in a long braid down her back. She examines me, and says with a smile that I'm already six centimeters dilated. Then, Lee walks with me on endless circuits through the house, holding me up as I squat through each contraction.

Mom seems to be everywhere at once – making turkey-vegetable soup and fruit gelatin, getting orange juice or ice cubes for me, wiping my face with a cool wet cloth, spreading plastic drop cloths on the floor beside the bed, helping Bonnie set up T.V. trays for her instruments.

Even deep in labor as I am, I notice the touch of her hand on my arm at times – a fleeting touch, cool and gentle, full of unspoken support, slightly awkward, a tentative new connection between us.

At two in the afternoon, my water breaks. The fluid is clear and Bonnie tells me its time to start pushing. Lee holds me from behind, bracing me on the edge of the bed. I feel a huge contraction. “Push!” says Bonnie, and I bear down. Mom, sitting beside me, takes my hand and I grip it tightly.

“You're doing great!” says Bonnie.

“You can do it, honey!” says Lee in my ear.

They cheer me on as I push for almost an hour. Finally, Bonnie says, “I can see the head!” We all smile. I feel another contraction starting, and Bonnie says, “Easy now, don't push with this one.” I pant and blow, letting Bonnie ease the head out. Suddenly, I feel a pop, and a rush of fluid, and Bonnie heaves a small, wet, red-faced, crying body up onto my stomach.

I hear, as if from far away, Lee's voice saying, “It's a girl!” and Mom's voice counting fingers and toes, but all of my being is absorbed into the whole of the tiny object I hold. All I can think is: it's a baby – there really is a baby – my baby.

“Don't cry,” I whisper to her. “I'm here. Mommy's right here.”

Bonnie helps Lee and Mom wash and dress the baby. We've decided to name her Annie Rose. Lee brings her back to the bedroom and sits by me, cradling her. “She's wonderful,” he says, stroking her downy head. “Little Annie.” I can see that his eyes are full of awe at this small person, his daughter.

She begins to cry and Bonnie helps me position her to nurse for the first time. Mom stands near-by, watching misty-eyed, pausing for a moment in her clean-up efforts, her arms full of dirty towels. Lee reaches out to brush a stray wisp of hair from my face, his fingers lingering on my cheek like a kiss.

* * * * * * *

The next day, Mom and Lee are in the hall trying to change Annie's diaper. I can't see them, but I can hear them bumbling around, whispering and giggling. We're all amateurs here – Mom hasn't changed a diaper for twenty-five years – and we're all giddy from lack of sleep.

Suddenly, I hear shrieks from the hall. Lee is yelling, “Get a diaper, get a diaper!” Then they both howl with laughter amidst wild scuffling sounds.

“What happened?” I call. No answer. “Hey!” I yell louder. “What's going on?”

Mom comes to the door. She presses her hand to her chest and leans back against the door frame. She can hardly speak for laughing. “We had just gotten her old diaper off when she wet.”

“She peed? All over the changing table?”

“No, no,” she gasps. Straight up in the air – like a fountain – and it ran down the wall!”

I start laughing now, picturing it. “I thought only boys did that,” I say.

Then Lee comes in bringing Annie in a hopelessly crooked diaper. His proud grin is as big as the gap in the side of the diaper. Mom and I can only point at it as we collapse anew in convulsive laughter.

* * * * * * *

Later, when Annie is asleep, and Lee has gone to the grocery store, Mom comes in and sits on the bed by me. “When you were born,” she says after a minute, “you were so little they had to keep you in the hospital for three weeks. I cried so much, your father had to call the hospital twice a day to check on you.”

“Mom, you never told me that before.”

She shrugs. “You were always so independent. Even when you were small, you never wanted to be held, you always squirmed and pushed me away.”

I listen in dismay. She looks at her hands in her lap. “And then, when you were older, you were so close to Mimi. I didn't mind that really, I just wished you needed me more.” She takes a deep breath and meets my eyes for a moment. “I've never seen a baby being born before – I was drugged asleep when you were born. I thought this home-birth was crazy at first, but, well, it's meant a lot to me to be here for Annie's birth. I just wanted you to know that.” She leans over to hug me, a feathery hug, her cheek soft as breath against mine for a moment. “I know I've seemed critical,” she adds quietly, straightening up. “Maybe I was just trying to make myself seem needed.”

“Oh, Mom,” I whisper, my voice wavering on an edge of tears. “But I did need you.” I take a ragged breath. “I've always wanted your approval more than anyone else's.”

“And I guess,” she says after a moment, “I've always wanted yours.”

All at once, I understand new things about my mother, about our relationship. We get tissues to wipe our eyes and sit in silence for a while.

“When you were born,” she says again, “I was all alone. Strange doctors and interns came in and looked up in me and poked at me.” I grimace. “It was horrible. They didn't let the father stay with you back then, but I don't think your father would have wanted to go through that anyway – he never would have done what Lee did. And he never changed a diaper in his life.”

I laugh. “And neither would Frank.” My mother meets my eyes and we smile at each other--smiles full of new understanding.

* * * * * * *

Annie is three months old when Dad calls to tell me that Mimi is dying. I can barely hear him over the phone. “Can you come,” he asks. “I need you to come.”

I see Mimi for the last time at her funeral. A silver casket lined in white satin cradles her small, frail body. She is dressed in blue silk, her hands folded one over the other, the injury hidden. Her face is strange to me – someone else's grandmother perhaps – not my Mimi.

I go to stand by my mother. A woman I don't know comes over and hugs Mom. “I'm so sorry, dear,” she says to my mother. “I know you will miss her.”

Suddenly, tears are welling up in me, spilling over. I dig in my purse for a tissue. I'm the one who will miss her, I think. I'm the one who will miss her the most.

Dad sets down a flower arrangement with white roses and comes over to hug me. I feel the smoothness of his shaved tan cheek, smell lime aftershave. “Are you okay?” he asks. I nod against his shoulder. “I'm glad you're here,” he says. I swallow hard at my tears and hug him again.

* * * * * * *

The next day, at my parents house, I am watching Mom play with Annie. She holds her high above her lap and jiggles her. They are laughing together. She must have played with me like that, I think, and suddenly I feel as if I am reliving the forgotten parts of my own childhood. I hear my daughter laughing in my mother's arms and a wave of forgiveness washes over me. Mimi meant so much to me – don't I want my daughter to be close to her grandmother?

Annie begins to cry a hungry cry, so I take her into the bedroom to nurse. Her tiny hand pats my breast and she grins up at my smile, pausing only a moment in her suckling. I wrap her crib quilt around her, running my hand over the new border and the old patchwork, admiring again the vibrant patterns of dark and light.

And I remember something that Mimi told me long ago. We were laying out the squares for our quilt when I shyly confessed to her that I was sometimes still afraid of the dark. She smiled at me, a smile of conspiracy and reassurance, and whispered, “Watch this.” Then, she began to take all the dark colored squares away from the pattern we had laid out. In their empty places the white felt table pad showed through, making squares of white amongst the light colored fabric squares. “How does it look to you now?” she asked.

I studied this new pattern and felt the sameness of it, felt a yearning in it for some missing part. “It's too plain,” I said.

Mimi nodded and began replacing the dark squares. When she had finished, I saw how the light squares seemed to sparkle against the dark, that there was movement in the pattern, and wholeness.

I looked up at Mimi and she put her arm around me. “We need the dark, Beth,” she said. “It's part of the pattern and balance of things. Without it, we can't see how good the light is.” I nodded, not quite understanding then, but the darkness never scared me much after that.

Life really is like that, I think now, needing both the dark times and the light times to give it depth and beauty. I am sad that Annie will never know her great-grandmother, but I have many stories I can tell her – a patchwork of love, and sadness too, quilted now into my own spirit.

Mom pops her head in the door to tell me she's doing my laundry. I laugh and shake my head, surprised to realize that this doesn't make me angry. “Thanks, Mom,” I say.

She comes in and smoothes down Annie's wispy hair with a tenderness that touches me. “Mom,” I say, “I'm going to talk to Lee again about moving into Mimi's house. I think . . . ” I pause as Annie reaches out to grip Mom's finger in her tiny fist. “I think it will be good to come home.”

The End

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