were enormous. Four to the inch, five on a good one. She stuck herself twice and said a word I'd never heard her say. I made her take one out and do it again, and she did, without arguing, and it was hardly any better.
"Small stitches," I said. "Smaller."
"I'm trying."
"Eight to the inch. Ten if you're proud."
"How many do you do?" she said.
I didn't answer that one. I just kept going.
We worked a while without talking. The light moved across the table. Out in the living room, I could hear Dad on the phone with somebody about a panel upgrade, saying, "Well, I'd have to open up that wall and see." After a while Carla set down her needle and flexed her hand and looked at the quilt, at the white blocks going gold in the late sun and the thirty names coming up out of them one by one the way they did every afternoon now, if you waited.
"Things are going to be different in this house," she said. "I think."
I tied off my thread and bit it. I'd been waiting three years to say it, I realized, and I hadn't known.
"Different how?" I said.
Carla thought about it for a long time. She's like that now. She thinks before she answers. I think she always did, really, and I just never asked her anything she had to think about.
"I'm going to ask first," she said. "Before I move anything. Before I decide what anybody needs. And you're going to tell me what's in the room. Even when it's hard. Even when it's your mama, and I'm jealous, and I'm being stupid about it. You tell me anyway, and I'll stay." She picked her needle back up. "That's how. That's the whole plan. I don't have a spreadsheet for it."
"You'll make one," I said.
"I'll make one," she agreed, and we both laughed.
I took up the border where Nell's blade had gone through it. On the cut piece, in my grandmother's stitches, it said We w. On the quilt, across the gap, it said ere here. I closed the gap one stitch at a time, white on white, until the line ran whole again all the way around the edge, the way she'd meant it to, so that whichever way you folded it, it would be somewhere.
We were here. We were here. We were here.
When I was done, I held my ruler against the seam and counted. Carla leaned over to look.
"How many?" she said.
"Fourteen," I said. "But I'm a show-off."