And I thought if I took it away you'd come out from under it. And you'd be cold for a while and then you'd come out. And maybe you'd come downstairs." She was crying now, but her voice was still level, which was worse. "That's what I thought. That's the whole ugly thing. I didn't ask you because I knew what you'd say, and I didn't ask your father because I knew he wouldn't say anything at all."
The headlights found a mailbox shaped like a largemouth bass, mouth open, painted green and silver, with BREWER on its side in stick-on letters.
"There," I said.
Carla put on the blinker, though there wasn't another car for a mile, and turned in.
* * *
Nell Brewer's workshop was an old chicken house behind her home, long and low with a tin roof, and every window in it was lit. We could hear a radio inside as we came across the yard, a different station, bluegrass, and the hum of a sewing machine running hard. Carla knocked on the door frame. The machine stopped.
The woman who opened the door was tall, in her sixties, with gray hair cropped short as a man's and a pair of reading glasses on top of her head and another pair on her nose. She had on a canvas apron with a pincushion strapped to the wrist like a watch. Behind her I could see the whole long room: shelves to the ceiling, and on every shelf, bears. Hundreds of bears. Bears made of log cabin blocks and Grandmother's Flower Garden and Drunkard's Path, sitting in rows with their shoe-button eyes, and pillows, and stuffed hearts, and Christmas stars, and in big wire bins along the floor, pieces of quilts sorted by color, like a butcher's case.
"Can I help you?" Nell said.
"I'm Carla Pruitt," said Carla. "Opal Hensley sent us. You bought a quilt from Second Blessings today. A white one with blue stars."
Nell looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at me.
"Is it yours?" she said.
"It was my grandmother's," I said. "Ivy Calloway."
Nell took the glasses off her nose. "Well," she said. "Come in, then. I've been sitting with her about an hour. I was going to call Opal first thing in the morning." She stepped back. "I'm sorry about the corner. I need to tell you that right off. I didn't know."
The star quilt was on her cutting table at the far end of the room, spread out flat on a green cutting mat that ran the whole length of the table. A big rotary cutter lay beside it, and a long clear ruler, and