of the fabric in the back closet went to the quilting circle. And then the offer came through on the house in Hartland Glen, because Carla had been offered a supervisor job at the big UK hospital in Lexington, more money than she'd ever made, and Dad said Lexington had more work for electricians anyway, and the boxes started.
I slept under the star quilt every night that year. I'm not ashamed of it. Some nights I traced the stitches between the stars with my fingertip in the dark, the curving feathers and loops in the white blocks, the way you'd trace the letters on a headstone. I didn't know that was exactly what I was doing.
* * *
"Call them," I said. "Call the church. Call them right now."
"June, it's four-thirty. The thrift store closes at five on Thursdays and the sorting room's in the basement. Nobody's even going to hear the phone."
"Then I'll drive over there."
"You're not driving anywhere like this."
"Like what?"
"Like this." She gestured at me, at all of me, and I suppose I was a sight: my DQ polo with the Blizzard stain on the front, my face blotched, my hands shaking so hard I'd dropped my visor without noticing. "Sit down a second. Please. Let me tell you what I was thinking, and then if you still want to, we'll call Opal Hensley at home. All right?"
"You can tell me in the car."
"I'll buy you a new one," she said. And I could hear it in her voice, that she had rehearsed this. That she had stood in this garage, maybe, while the Methodist men loaded the van, and said it over to herself. "I already looked. That gallery in Berea, the one on the square across from the college, they have handmade ones, Junie, real Kentucky quilts, made by real quilters, you can pick it out yourself. Any pattern you want. Any color. We'll drive down Saturday. And it'll be—"
That was when Dad's truck turned in. I heard it before I saw it, the way you always hear a diesel, and then the white F-250 was in the driveway with its ladder rack and its blue letters, and Dad was climbing down out of the cab with his lunch cooler in one hand and his reading glasses pushed up on his head, where he always forgot them. He had plaster dust on his jeans. He looked at me, and then at Carla, and then at the empty rectangle on the concrete where the wall of red-taped boxes had been, and something in his face changed. Not much. Just something.