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

was ninety-four. She could no longer ride her bike wherever she wanted. Her grandchildren were scattered and she couldn’t run her candy shop. She loved her great-grandchildren very much, loved watching them needlepoint, even Hayden who pretended he didn’t like it.

But she was rapidly losing independence, and it was even a chore to dye her own hair. That just made it seem like there wasn’t much point going on. These days, she was pragmatic like that.

The years for fancy were long gone.

She had regrets. A mountain of them. She did her best not to dwell on them.

She hadn’t finished that quilt, not ever. Now most of the fabric, along with her plans for it, were in the attic at The Dowell House and she couldn’t manage all those stairs, not anymore.

She wished she had gotten her mother’s diary down from the attic before it had gotten too hard for her to get up there. But she hadn’t. It didn’t matter.

She could see the beautiful, red cover in her mind even now. The stamped gold letters there. And she could recall the words of her father, as recorded by her mother, by heart.

You can never go so far that you can’t come back home.

Those words had brought her back to Bear Creek years ago.

They were calling her now.

She felt it. Heard her mother’s voice more strongly now when she recalled the words from her diary.

Then she picked up her own diary, blue and filled with failures. With heartbreaks. With business she had no time to finish now.

But she thought of Mary, of Mary’s beautiful girls. The loving marriage her daughter had made with Joe. She couldn’t take credit. Not for that. Not for the strength and talent of her granddaughters. For Lark’s creativity and spark and perseverance in the face of loss Addie couldn’t bring herself to ask about.

For Hannah’s brilliant musical gifts, and Avery’s certainty.

For Linda’s happiness. The life she’d watched her have from afar. She might never have been able to be her mother in practice, but she’d been her mother in her heart.

She didn’t need credit. They were her joy.

There were so many things she’d left unsaid. But as she finished putting curlers in her bright red hair, and lay down in her bed, she didn’t feel regret.

She felt only love.

And a sense that someday all of the secrets, all of the mysteries, would be laid bare. That the things hidden in darkness would be brought to the light. And she had the strongest feeling of being forgiven.

Maybe not now, but there was a certainty deep within her that someday Mary would, and she could feel it even now.

But you’re running out of time...

No. She wasn’t running out of time. She’d had time. Time that had been good, time that had been painful.

And in the end she knew that all those heartbreaks couldn’t be erased, couldn’t be changed or easily mended. But they were not stains on her life, not now. They were part of who she was. Each broken piece coming together to create Dorothy Adeline Dowell.

She had thought as a girl she had to stop being Dot. For Dot had loved and lost, and felt destroyed by it. She’d become Addie, and that hadn’t fit either.

But she was both. Everything. All the sorrow, all the triumph, all the joy.

It filled her now. Gave her a sense of wholeness. The good along with the bad.

Her daughters, her granddaughters, they were her legacy and they would carry on. Any scattered pieces she had left behind, fragments she had never managed to mend, they would.

She knew it as sure as she’d ever known anything.

As she let her eyes drift closed, a smile touched her lips. Clear as day, she saw George as he’d been the last time she’d seen him. In his military uniform. Smiling. So handsome. Perfect in every way.

And the deepest sense of peace she’d ever known washed over her, like the warmth of a quilt, all blue and silver and lace and rich red velvet.

Finished.

acknowledgments

I owe my thanks to so many people, as always. To Rusty Keller and Megan Crane, for always being up for a stay in a historic house. And listening to me read strange histories to you while we sit in them. And again to Megan, for reading this book when I finished it so I could have her greatly valued take. To Jackie Ashenden and Nicole Helm, who read this in chunks and took the time to help me get a handle on my characters. To my editor Flo Nicoll for her deep insight, which helps me take a book to where I really want it to go. To my agent Helen Breitwieser, who provides constant support.

The history of WWII is foundational in both sides of my family, as it is in many. Before this book came out, my grandfather, a veteran of the war, passed away at ninety-three. He was a walking, talking piece of history, and the world is poorer for his absence.

I owe a special thank-you to my family for this book, because the starting point for this idea came from our story. Though this story is entirely fictional, the initial seeds of it came from this history, and I want to pay it tribute. To my grandmother, who lost her first love July 15, 1944, in the Battle of Normandy, and was left a young widow with a baby. And to her first husband, my uncle’s father, George. Who I know was much loved and has been missed all these years.

from the author

There’s really no way around the obvious comparison that, for me, the pieces of this book came together like a quilt.

Lark and Ben, as characters, had been with me for a long time, and I knew I wanted to write their story, but didn’t have a setting for it.

There is a historic house in my town that I drive past almost every day that I’ve been fascinated by since childhood.

And my grandmother’s life