"Opal told me," she said. "About Ivy's quilt. I want to see the block for January twenty-second."
Nobody moved for a second. Then Carla said, "Of course," and went and drew the blinds, and turned on the lamp, and swung it low across the table, because the sun was already down.
Verna T. Boy. 1-22-62. Thomas.
Mrs. Tackett looked at it for a long time, leaning on her cane.
"Ivy and me," she said, "sat in the same pew at that church for sixty years. We went to the same circle every Tuesday. We made, I don't know, two hundred quilts together. And we never said one word about it. Not one. Not ever." She shook her head slowly. "I didn't know she'd kept it. I told her, that night in the sewing room. I said, 'His name's Thomas, Ivy, after my daddy, don't you forget it,' and she said, 'I won't, Verna,' and I thought, well, that's just something a girl says." She was quiet. "My husband never knew. My children don't know. I'm not going to tell them, and I'd ask you not to."
"We won't," said Carla.
"But I want to be in your book." Mrs. Tackett turned and looked at Carla, and she must have heard about the book from Opal, or from somebody, the way everything goes around Harlow Fork. "If a man ever comes asking. About January twenty-second, 1962. Through that Louisville woman or anybody. You tell him his mother's name was Verna. And you tell him if he'd like to come, I'd like to see him. I'm eighty-two. I'd like to see him."
Carla typed it, right there, with Mrs. Tackett standing over her shoulder reading every word, and read it back, and changed one word when Mrs. Tackett asked her to. Then she printed it and Mrs. Tackett signed it, in shaky blue ballpoint, and Carla put it in a folder, and the folder in a fireproof box she had bought at the Walmart in Richmond that afternoon, which had seemed to me at the time like the most Carla thing she had ever done, and which I now think was one of the kindest.
* * *
We moved to Lexington two weeks later, on the first of November.
The quilt rode in the front seat of Carla's Camry, on my lap, folded in thirds and then in thirds again so the folds wouldn't fall in the same place twice. The mugs were in a green-taped box in the back. The afghan was