Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

always had been. She’d run errands with her without complaint, had spent time gardening with her, twirling and laughing in the sunshine. She hadn’t helped with chores but she’d followed along, chattering behind her while she cleaned.

And when she wasn’t sweet...she was a tempest. But it was part of all that Lark was.

But when she’d left home, she’d stopped all that. Like whatever thread had connected them had been decidedly cut when she’d left Bear Creek.

That was when she’d changed, and Mary had never been able to tell if it had been maturity or college.

She looked around the room even more closely, looking for clues about her youngest child. Who she was, why she was here.

If Mary were another woman, another sort of mom, she might have just asked her. But that kind of heart-to-heart stuck in her throat, and she never knew quite how to approach it.

When the girls had talked, it had been to Addie.

That stuck in Mary’s chest and burned. Addie had passed her over, and she’d come back just in time to teach her daughters the language of femininity, something Mary felt utterly clueless to.

Addie had made it so she couldn’t quite relate to her own daughters. If she’d never come back...

If she’d never come back they’d have had Mary’s influence and maybe then it would have been easier.

But then maybe Avery wouldn’t have become the wife and mother she was.

Maybe Lark wouldn’t have found so much sweetness.

Maybe Hannah would have had less of a sense of adventure.

She didn’t want her girls to be different.

So her resentment always felt hollow, small and mean. And there was no use dwelling on it now. So she turned her focus back to the room she was in.

The place was cluttered, but in a very careful way. Everything designed to be beautiful.

But that was exactly how everything Lark touched turned out.

Another reason Mary felt reluctant to do any work on the quilt.

Mary didn’t feel confident in any of the work she had done on her square, not even with the help that Avery had given her earlier in the week. Lark had told her that everything was fine, and that if she followed the guidelines carefully everything would turn out. But she was reluctant to make stitches, because even though they could be torn out, she was concerned about the fabric of the wedding dress, which seemed so antique and dear.

Even though she didn’t know whose wedding dress it was, she still felt the connection to that fabric, and its time in history. A wedding dress was such a personal, important thing. Her own had cost a hundred and fifty dollars, and had been made by a friend, who had put together the fabric of her dreams into something that suited her perfectly.

Expensive or not, wedding dresses were so sentimental, and cutting up a gown with that much significance was horrifying enough, but attempting to turn it into something beautiful was quite another.

She wasn’t a frilly type of woman. But her wedding dress had been. Getting ready for her wedding without her mother had been a deep, terrible wound. So many hurts had come up during that time. But Joe had been...

Joe had been the right kind of rock for her, as he always was. Strong and steady, but with a softness to him that her own father hadn’t possessed.

She’d said she’d marry him in blue jeans. He’d said he’d marry her that way too, but if she wanted a wedding dress she should have one.

She’d gone shopping for it with her groom. Breaking all manner of tradition. But immersing herself in something so...girlie had been a whole different thing to what she was used to, and watching Joe’s face as she’d come out in each one had done something to repair the cracks in her heart.

Her wedding day had been the most special, incredible day of her life and she’d felt like the princess she’d never imagined she could be.

Wedding dresses, for her, were sacred.

Just like weddings.

Just like the way she loved Joe.

But when it came to the quilt, all she had managed to do was cutting and temporary tacking. Anything else had her feeling far too...it was like anger, but it trembled inside her.

The fabric squares she would be sewing the dress pieces onto were a lovely wine color that complemented the parlor curtains Avery was using on hers. It was also a nice contrast to the midnight blue that Hannah was working with.

For all her fussing and instruction, as far as Mary knew, Lark hadn’t chosen anything yet. But once she did, she knew that whatever her youngest daughter produced would be perfect. When inspiration struck her, just like lightning, she could create. It always amazed Mary, because she didn’t have that ability inside of her.

And sometimes... Sometimes, a very small part of her that she felt ashamed of found it unfair.

Because it was something that Lark had gotten from Mary’s mother. When Mary felt as if she had gotten nothing from Addie herself.

And she couldn’t see much of herself in Lark at all.

For all that she’d been her little sunshine fairy, Lark hadn’t admired enough of anything in Mary to take on any of her hobbies.

No gardening or baking for Lark.

“How is your progress?” Lark appeared from the back, her honey blond hair piled on her head in a large, messy bun. She was wearing a long white dress, her shoulders bare, a silver band painted onto her upper arm.

“It’s not a tattoo,” she said, poking at it.

“I know that,” Mary said.

“But you looked very concerned.”

“Well, I do know what a tattoo looks like.”

“That’s good.”

“You don’t have any. Do you?” That was another thing she didn’t know about her daughter.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to,” Lark said, winking.

“Have you heard from Hannah?”

Lark frowned. “No. Not today.”

Hannah was distant in a way that seemed deliberate. Mary made sure she stopped by to check in on her middle daughter most days, but she always had