Then she did something I didn't expect. She didn't flinch, or cry, or say that's not fair. She nodded, slowly, as if I had confirmed something on a form.
"No," she said. "I'm not. I know that too."
* * *
I should explain about the quilt, because for most of my life I didn't understand it either, and I don't want anybody thinking it was just a blanket I was sentimental about, although it was that too.
My grandmother was Ivy Calloway. She was my mother's mother, and she lived her whole married life in a white frame house on Calloway Branch Road, four miles outside Harlow Fork, Kentucky, which is a town in the hills between Richmond and Berea that you have not heard of unless you have gotten lost on the way to one or the other. She had a garden the size of a basketball court and a Singer treadle machine she refused to electrify and a closet in the back bedroom that went all the way under the eaves and was full, floor to ceiling, of fabric. Feed sacks from the forties. Men's shirts. Somebody's flowered curtains. Calico by the yard from the Ben Franklin store in Richmond that closed before I was born. She quilted every winter of her life, mostly for the church bazaar, sometimes for weddings, and she sold a few to the craft galleries in Berea when she needed the money for something like a roof or a transmission.
She did not sell the star quilt. She never sold it, never entered it in the county fair, never let anybody at church see it. It lived folded at the foot of her own bed until the week after my mother's funeral, when I was nine years old and hadn't slept through the night in eleven days, and she drove over to our house on Mulberry Street with it in a Kroger bag and spread it out on my bed herself, tucking the corners under the mattress with her big chapped hands.
"This one's for keeping warm," she said. "And for keeping."
I was nine. I thought she meant keeping it forever, and I suppose she did. I didn't know there was another meaning folded inside that one like a second sheet.
My mother died of a brain aneurysm on a Tuesday in March when I was in the fourth grade. She was thirty-four. She was standing in the produce aisle at the Save-A-Lot in Richmond holding a bag of clementines, and then she was on the floor, and that was it. There was nothing anybody could have done. Everybody said so, the doctors, the preacher, the women from church who came with casseroles. I believed them. I still believe them. It didn't help.