When Chenille Is Not Enough

Bozidar’s eyes remained on the quilt. The colors and textures of the silks, satins and velvets formed a story in his mind. The embroidery added details, warnings and admonitions. He heard Susan list the lost data, then bemoan the delay in her work. The sorrow in her voice sent a shiver through him.

“What worries me most is that the hotel might pull out of the event. That would ruin everything,” Susan said.

“It’s not the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Edna said. She patted the quilt. “Your great-grandmother survived worse than cranky electronics, and so can you.”

“Edna is right,” Louise said. “I have to leave now anyway. Kyle is coming home from school for a quick visit. I’ll get him to help me with the iPad and I’ll e-mail you all the documents tonight.”

“I thought Kyle was in medical school,” Li-Ming said.

“He’s still pre-med. Medical school is a couple of years off. But he wants to do research, so he’s spending as much time learning computers as he is biology.”

Li-Ming grabbed a flyer from the counter. “Let me give you my nephew’s e-mail and cell phone,” she said as she wrote. “Between the boys and the two of us, we’ll get things sorted.”

Louise thanked her, took the paper and left. Li-Ming went to the office with promises that her nephew would have made some progress by now. Susan reached for the quilt.

“Wait a minute,” Edna said. “I haven’t finished with the family history.”

Bozidar shook his head. “I think this is an inconstant time.”

“Excuse me?” Edna asked.

“Um, er, unhappy time? I must leave,” he said, and ran from the shop.

“That’s twice he’s broken a speed record getting out of here,” Edna said. She went to the picture window and scanned the parking lot. “Boy, is he fast. I don’t see him anywhere.” She turned to Susan. “Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks he’s a little off?”

Susan raised her eyebrows. “When I said there was something odd about him, I was considered a meddling, overprotective mother.”

“You are, but that’s beside the point.” Edna shook her head. “I’d say he was acting like a normal man trapped in a quilt shop except that he asked so many questions.” She gathered the quilt in her arms and headed toward Susan’s office. “Come along, unless you want me to put this back in the frame myself.”

Susan trotted after her mother. A feeling that she was missing something important rattled at the back of her skull, but like a snake slithering off the path at the last moment, the feeling disappeared. As she repositioned the quilt in the frame, she noticed a faint whiff of lavender. The nagging sense that she needed to pay attention returned, then faded with the last hint of the lavender scent.

***

Susan and Cecily opened the shop together the next morning. They completed the ritual of unlocking cabinets, starting coffee, arranging sale items and tidying displays. When the showroom and classroom were in order, they met at the cutting table and looked toward the office.

“You have to go in there some time, Mom,” Cecily said.

“I know.” Susan picked up a rotary cutter and examined the blade.

“You have things to do in the office that don’t require the computer.”

“I know.” Susan put the cutter in a red wire basket, removed a pen and clicked it open and shut.

“Mom, the computer will not bite you. It’s broken. Even if you turn it on, it won’t do anything.” Cecily took the pen away, put her hands on Susan’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. “Do you want me to go in first and push the button?”

Susan wrinkled her nose and squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes,” she squeaked. “Maybe if you turn it on it will work.”

Cecily laughed. “Stop it, you’re just teasing me now.”

Susan smiled, took Cecily’s hand and headed toward the office. “Of course I am. How often do I get the chance? But I do wish the damn thing would magically fix itself. I hate having to break in new systems. Something always gets lost, or crucial files won’t open. And there is just too much going on right now.”

They entered the office. Susan sat in her chair and glared at the computer. Cecily examined the crazy quilt, back in its usual place.

“Say, Mom, what do you know about Grandma Edna’s grandmother?”

Susan swiveled around. “That depends on your definition of know. I grew up on stories of Agnes the Great, but you have to consider the source.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, chuckling. “If half of what Mom told me was true, Agnes was even more of a character than your grandmother.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Cecily said as she settled into a wooden chair with a needlepoint cushion. “Did Grandma really call her Agnes the Great?”

“No,” Susan said. “That was my nickname. It’s not as snarky as it sounds. She was my great-grandmother, so that’s how I kept the stories about her separate from the stories about other female family members. Well, let’s see - she came to California on the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad. That was to Los Angeles. The family moved up to San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. She lived through that, the Depression, Prohibition, both world wars. Oh, and the ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast.”

“The one Orson Welles did? That caused a panic?”

Susan nodded. “According to legend. There was certainly a lot of grumbling the day after the broadcast, but to say it caused a panic is probably an exaggeration. However, to hear Edna tell the story, all of San Francisco was in an uproar until Agnes single-handedly calmed the crowds and sent them all home.”

“Another case in point,” she said, pointing to the crazy quilt. “According to Edna, that quilt was made to honor Agnes’s grandparents, who were part of the Underground Railway during the Civil War. Agnes supposedly remembered the quilts her grandmother made to guide runaway slaves, and incorporated some of the blocks and stitching into her own quilt. Current research seems to indicate that never happened. So what are we to believe? I’d like to think our ancestors were abolitionists, but I don’t have any proof. I’d like to think Agnes was a courageous woman, a natural leader, but I don’t have anything from her except that quilt fragment and Mom’s stories.”

“Nothing? Not even pictures?”

“Agnes always took the pictures,” Susan said. She tilted her head, scanning Cecily with an appraising eye. “She was a good photographer, too. Mom has a couple of albums with family photos, as well as some landscapes. You might get your talent for films from her. Oh, and there were shots of her garden. Agnes always put in an herb garden wherever she lived.”

“You must have got your love of lavender from her,” Cecily said. She examined the crazy quilt. “You know, Mom, I’ve seen some of those Underground Railroad quilts. They don’t look anything like this.”

“Of course they don’t. They’re made of pieced blocks, from plain cotton, with no embellishment at all.”

Cecily took the frame from the wall and balanced it on the end of Susan’s desk. “Even accounting for the different materials, the block patterns don’t reference anything like a Hole in the Barn Door or a North Star. And you would expect to see a path in the embroidery, but each area is self-contained. To be honest, this looks like a star chart, or as a back-drop on a science fiction set.”

Susan leaned in to examine the quilt when the bell jangled. “Maybe Edna got her love of all things space-related from Agnes. Put this back on the wall while I see who’s here, please.”

“Susan, I come bearing tech support,” Louise called from the showroom.

“I can hear Kyle rolling his eyes,” Susan said from the hall. She entered the showroom in time to see Louise patting her son’s cheek. “Told you so. You always pat his cheek when you’ve embarrassed him.” She hugged Kyle, her head barely reaching his shoulder. “Thanks for coming. I’ve been informed that my machine is long past its expiration date, so you don’t have to tap-dance around bad news. If it’s dead, it’s dead. Cecily is in the office and can tell you more than I can about what happened.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Kyle said, and headed to the office. He tapped on the door frame before he entered. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Cecily said. She adjusted the frame and turned to face Kyle. “You look good. I expected to see you haggard and exhausted from your studies.”

He lingered in the doorway. His hair was braided in long corn rows, and his skin was the color of a chocolate milkshake. “Midterms were rough, but I survived. And a couple of days at home will help. So what’s with your mom’s computer?”

“Aside from it being from the dark ages?” Cecily said as she pushed the power button. “Not sure. She might have picked up a virus.”

“Does she upgrade her security regularly?”

Cecily laughed. “You’re joking, right? She doesn’t even know how to reset her e-mail password. But Li-Ming does, and she told me they’re current.”

He sat at the desk, watching lights spin and flicker across the screen. “This doesn’t look good.” The lights changed colors as they swirled diagonally from corner to corner. “It’s more interesting than the blue screen of death, but I think the prognosis is the same.”

She leaned over his shoulder, watching the changing patterns. “Yeah, I thought so. Well, you’ll be the third person to tell her she needs an upgrade, and Mom is partial to the rule of three.”

He glanced up at her. “Rule of three?”

“You’ve never heard her say ‘If three people tell you you’re a duck, look for bread crumbs and a pond’? It’s one of her favorite phrases.”

“Ah.” He tilted back. “I like the hair. Looks good on you, especially with that green sweater. What are they calling it this year? Emerald?”

“Malachite.” She fluffed her bangs and smiled. “But it’s green to everyone in the non-quilting world.”

He smiled in return, and the silence grew warm and comfortable between them. “Okay,” he said, jerking his head toward the computer, “so it’s probably picked up some malware.”

The lights on the screen changed pattern again. She frowned, then turned to the quilt on the wall. She tapped his shoulder and pointed.

“What?” he asked.

“Does this embroidery look like the patterns on the screen?”

He rolled the chair closer to the quilt, then lifted his bottom off the seat in a half-crouch. He squinted, straightened his knees and moved within an inch of the frame.

“No, not that section,” she said as she guided his chin to the left. “Right there.”

“I can sort of see it,” he said. He took a step back and scanned the quilt from the top left corner to the bottom right. “But only sort of. What is it about the patterns that strikes you as similar to both?”

Cecily laughed. “I’m not one of your test subjects, okay? I’ll admit the similarities are subtle, but if you know what you’re looking for . . . well, like here.”

She pointed to a small triangle of blue silk. It was surrounded by rectangles of velvet in three different shades of coral. The three seams were covered with a purple silk thread worked in a zig-zag. At each point sat a three-lobed flower in white perle cotton. In the valleys were tiny French knots in various shades of green.

“Now look at the screen,” she said.

Kyle shifted his gaze from quilt to screen and back. He took a pen from the desk and held it to the quilt like a ruler.

“What are you doing?” Cecily asked.

“Trying to get a sense of the relative dimensions.” He sat at the screen and moved the cursor over the pattern. “You’re right,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that make a great story? Somewhere in the universe a mighty civilization sent out a coded message, and millions of light-years away a young woman in a sea-side city heard it. Only she didn’t know what she was experiencing, because of course she was a different species and the visions she saw didn’t make any sense. But she turned that vision into art - a quilt - and handed it down from generation to generation, until finally the girl’s descendant goes to the stars.”

Kyle raised one eyebrow.

“Fine, Mr. Hot-Shot Research King, what’s your explanation for the similarity?”

“I don’t have one,” he said. He looked at the screen again. “But since we’re making up stories, um, your mother’s hatred of all things technical has upset the computer. Driven it to the point of madness. Because your mom is right, the machines are alive, but they want to be our friends. So the computer latches on to the one thing it knows your mom likes and tries to replicate it.”

“And in the process dies, losing all the data Mom had and proving to her that technology is evil and out to get her.”

The two erupted in giggles. Kyle collapsed in the chair, the giggles turning into guffaws. Cecily punched him in the shoulder.

“Shush, they’ll hear us. Mom’s in a frenzy as it is, you don’t want her to think we’re laughing at her.”

“Like she doesn’t know,” Kyle said. “But you’re right, I’m here to fix the computer, not heap scorn and derision on a poor technophobe.”

Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Cecily jumped back from the desk and Kyle hunched toward the computer, fingers hovering above the keyboard. Susan came through the doorway just as the bell in the showroom jingled.

“Oh, darn,” Susan said. She turned toward the hall, then back to Kyle. “I should get out there. Any luck on the machine?”

“Not yet,” Kyle said. He inhaled sharply, pressed his lips together, and resolutely stared at the computer screen.

Taking Susan’s arm, Cecily led her out of the office. “Best to let him work in peace, Mom.” She glanced over her shoulder and mouthed the words don’t laugh as she accompanied her mother.

“I just want things to work,” Susan said. Her shoulders drooped and her gait became a shuffle.

“They will, Mom, with time and luck. And maybe a little money invested in an upgrade. Oh, but we did see one interesting thing. The screen changed colors, and these neat patterns appeared. They looked a lot like some of the embroidery on the quilt.”

Susan looked at Cecily, her expression a model of skepticism. “Uh-huh.”

“No, it’s true,” Cecily said. “Even Kyle saw it.”

“Kyle saw what?” Louise asked.

The bell jangled and the door opened, letting in the scent of lavender. Bozidar entered the store. He closed the door behind him and stood there, hands clasped.

“Hi, Mr. Cottonwood,” Cecily said. “You might be interested in this, too. It’s about our family quilt. I was telling Mom that the computer screen now has patterns that look a lot like some of the embroidery.”

Bozidar gasped, and stumbled forward.

The women rushed to him. Louise grabbed one arm and Cecily the other. They led him to the cutting table and steadied him against it.

“What did you see?” he asked, his voice thin and gravelly.

“The lines and colors on the screen looked similar to a section of the quilt,” Cecily said. “Are you sure you’re okay? Should we call 911?”

A sheen of moisture emerged on Bozidar’s forehead. It beaded in the furrows of his brow, and the drops shimmered green. The smell of lavender grew stronger as a faint haze emerged from his ears. His face appeared to melt into a chocolate glaze. His brown eyes turned black, then purple. He coughed, and green smoke burst out of his mouth.

Louise dropped Bozidar’s arm. She stumbled backward and looked around the store, fear in her eyes. She lurched toward a chenille pillow in the toy corner.

Bozidar, still coughing, watched her through the green smoke. “It wasn’t meant to be like this. Damn those beiges!”

Susan made a sharp cry, like a crow warning a blue jay to stay out of talon reach. She yanked Cecily away from Bozidar.

Louise took the chenille pillow and ran toward Bozidar. She shoved it in his face, knocking him to his knees.

Bozidar pushed the pillow away, threw it against the wall, and jumped to his feet. He grabbed Cecily with one hand and retrieved his black box from a pocket with the other. He held her against him like a shield, the box to her throat. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he tapped the box with his thumb and the two of them disappeared in a flash of light.