and Grandma Ivy's handwriting came up out of every white block, and I sat on one side with a pencil and a legal pad, and Carla sat on the other with her laptop, and Dad came and went with sandwiches and coffee and, once, a bag of clementines from the Kroger that he set on the sideboard without a word and that none of us mentioned.
Carla built it the way she'd build a chart. One sheet with a map of the quilt, every block numbered by row and column. One sheet with the transcription, exactly as written, with a column for anything that was uncertain, worn, or hard to read, and a column for the photo file. And one more sheet, which she made last and named, simply, REQUESTS, which was empty.
"Here's what I think," she said, and turned the laptop so I could see it. "This doesn't go on the internet. Not the list. Not the pictures. Not any of it. Not until we know what each of these women would want, and most of them we'll never know. So it works the way your grandmother set it up. Somebody comes asking, with a birthday and the name of the home, the way Margaret did, through Delphine or somebody like her. Then we look. If there's a block that matches, we share that one block, and only that one, with that one person." She tapped the empty sheet. "Every request gets written down. Who asked, when, what we told them. So it's never just somebody's memory. So it never depends on one person keeping it in their head till they die."
"Like a book," I said.
"Like a book," said Carla. "Only this one doesn't burn."
Some blocks were hard. A few had been worn nearly smooth along the folds, where the quilt had been folded the same way too many times in someone's cedar chest. One of them, in the second row, I couldn't make out at all. The name of the girl was clear, Joyce W., but the baby's name had been rubbed down by seven years of my own fingertips tracing it in the dark. I sat and looked at it for a long time and felt sick. Carla got up and moved the lamp, and then moved it again, and then went and got the little LED flashlight from Dad's work bag and lay down flat on the floor under the table edge with the flashlight on the cloth, an inch away, sideways.
"Ell," she said from under the table. "Capital L. Then an E, I think. Then a wide letter. M or W."