"What are you doing?" I said.
"Every block," Carla said. "Before we move it. Before we fold it, before we put it in a car, before anything else can happen to it. Every block, in this light, at this angle, front and back, with the row and number. And the border, all the way around." She didn't look up. "I should have done it the first day. I should have done it before I touched it. That's my whole job, June. That's the one thing I'm supposed to know how to do."
She photographed for forty minutes. Nell held the lamp. I read each block out loud, slowly, and Carla typed it into her phone as I read, and checked it against the picture, and made me read it again when she wasn't sure. Thirty blocks. Thirty girls. Babies born from that July to the next February, babies whose mothers had told my fifteen-year-old grandmother their secret names in the dark of a church home in Clay County, so that they would be somewhere in the world besides inside them. And the border, all the way around, which said the same thing over and over, between the cables, so that whichever way you folded it, it would be somewhere: We were here. We were here. We were here.
When we were done, Nell folded the quilt herself, the right way, the way Grandma Ivy used to, in thirds and then in thirds again so the folds wouldn't fall in the same place twice, and laid it in my arms, and put the cut triangle on top of it wrapped in a piece of clean muslin. Carla tried to give her a twenty-dollar bill. Nell wouldn't take it.
"You come to my booth on Saturday," she said. "You buy a bear. That's what you do."
"I'll buy ten," said Carla.
"Buy one," said Nell. "But pick it out careful."
In the Buick, I sat with the quilt in my lap and both arms around it and called Dad. He picked up before it rang.
"We've got it," I said, and that was all I could manage, and I heard him let his breath out on the other end of the line like he'd been holding it since two o'clock.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Come home." And then, after a second: "Is Carla all right?"
I looked over at her. She was driving with both hands, correcting left, her face lit green by the dashboard, staring straight ahead into the dark of the Big Hill road.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't think so."
* * *