We'd waited for four o'clock. Carla had looked up the time of sunset and worked it backward. When we brought Margaret into the dining room, the blinds were down on the east side and up on the west, and the light was coming in long and gold across the table, and the quilt lay there with every white block lit sideways and every line of my grandmother's stitches throwing its own thin shadow, and Margaret stopped in the doorway and put her hand on the frame.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, it's beautiful. I didn't know it would be beautiful."
Carla had asked me who should show her. I'd said Dad, because Ivy had told Dad. Dad had said me, because Ivy had given it to me. In the end we both did. Dad walked her down the side of the table, past the first row and the second, and I stood at the third, at the center block, and when she got there I pointed, without touching it, to the words inside the feathered wreath.
Ivy C. Girl. 11-9-61. Rose.
Margaret read it. I watched her lips move. Then she read it again. She bent closer and her glasses slid down her nose and she pushed them back up with one finger, and her mouth was trembling, and she pressed it closed.
"I had a good life," she said. Not to any of us, exactly. "I want to say that first. My mother and daddy were good people. They wanted me so much. They told me I was chosen, and I believed them, and it was true." She took a breath. "But they didn't know anything. The home told them nothing. And I always wondered—you think the strangest things—I always wondered about those six weeks. Before they came and got me. Whether anybody called me anything. Whether I was anybody's yet." She looked at the block. "Rose."
"She said it over every night," I said. My voice came out wrong, high and cracked, and I didn't care. "Dad says. She said all of them over, every night, so she wouldn't forget. For sixty-five years. You were in the middle. She put you in the middle."
Margaret looked at me then, really looked, the way people do when they're trying to find something in your face.
"May I touch it?" she said.
"Yes," I said. "Yes. Please."