The first rectangle was a planner, the kind with a pastel cover and gold corners. The second was a pack of socks, the good kind, wool, gray. Claire said thank you. She meant it, mostly. The socks were nice. Her feet were always cold at the bakery.
"We figured you'd want something practical, with all your working," Diane said. "You've never been a fuss-and-ribbons kind of girl."
Across the room, Grandma Ruth set her teacup down on its saucer with a small, distinct click.
"Is there one more for Madison?" she asked pleasantly. "I think I see one, Claire. Behind the tree skirt, there, on the right."
Claire looked. There was a box she hadn't seen, half hidden by the folds of the red velvet skirt, as if it had been tucked out of sight and then forgotten. It was wrapped in her mother's silver paper. The tag said Madison. She pulled it out. It was heavier than it looked.
"Oh," Diane said, and something in her voice wobbled. "That one can wait, actually, it's..."
But Madison had already reached for it. She tore the paper away and lifted the lid, and inside, folded in tissue, was a quilt.
It was not a store quilt. Even from across the room, Claire could see that. It was made of hundreds of small pieces in shades of green, deep pine and pale sage and the bright new green of leaves in May, arranged in a pattern of interlocking stars. The stitching was tiny and even. In one corner, in white thread, someone had embroidered a name.
Madison held it up, puzzled. "This is kind of old-lady," she said, laughing a little. "But, like, cute. Is it vintage?"
Nobody answered her. Underneath the quilt, in the tissue, was a long narrow box, and Madison opened that, too, and gasped. It was a necklace: a small oval sapphire on a fine gold chain, old-fashioned and delicate, the kind of thing that had been worn by someone a long time ago.
"Oh my God. Mom. Is this real?"
"It's real," Grandma Ruth said.
The room changed. Claire felt it, the way you feel the pressure drop before a storm. Her grandmother had not raised her voice. She had not moved from the armchair. She sat with her hands folded on the blanket over her knees and looked at the necklace in Madison's hand, and then at the quilt, and then, very deliberately, at Diane.
"That necklace belonged to my mother," Grandma Ruth said. "She wore it at her wedding in 1931. I wore it at mine. I made that quilt over two winters, with my bad hip propped on a pillow, and I put the name of the person I made it for in the corner. Madison, sweetheart, will you read the corner for me? My eyes aren't what they were."
Madison looked down at the corner of the quilt. Her face went slowly pink.
"It says Claire," she said.
The fire popped. On the mantel, the fourth stocking tipped a little further toward the screen.
"So I suppose my question," Grandma Ruth said, still pleasant, still calm, turning her pale blue eyes toward her son and his wife, "is a simple one. Where did Claire's gifts go?"