Inez had stitched 1968 through three layers of cloth. The numbers stood in the middle of her quilt, blue on white, straight enough to please a judge.
Below them she had sewn a blue square for her grandmother’s wedding dress.
The school exhibit opened Monday. On Sunday afternoon, Grandma Elsie arrived with the dress from the photograph.
It was an apron.
“I told you I still had it,” Elsie said. She spread it on the kitchen table.
Inez looked from the old photo to the cloth. The same narrow stripes ran across both. In the picture, the table hid the lower half of Elsie’s clothes. There was a bright pin at her throat.
“Mum said that was your wedding.”
Jo turned from the sink. “I thought it was.”
“It was a shop supper,” Elsie said. “The owner gave us pins when we’d been there a year. I married in 1968. This was 1967.”
Inez looked at the neat date.
“You’re certain?”
Her grandmother touched the pin in the photo.
“I liked that supper. I had paid for my own shoes, and they were terribly uncomfortable. I remember taking them off under the table.”
Jo dried her hands. “I’ve been telling that wrong for years.”
“I never knew you were telling it.”
The quilt lay across three chairs. Inez had made one patch for each person in her family. She had used scraps of her own fabric for the older parts, choosing colors from photographs. The central blue square was hers too. She had asked Elsie to bring the original piece of clothing so they could display it beside the quilt.
Her caption was already printed.
THREE GENERATIONS, ONE BEGINNING.
Under it she had written that everything began with Elsie’s wedding dress in 1968.
“It can still be about the wedding,” Jo said.
“It isn’t a dress,” Inez said.
“No,” said Elsie. “It isn’t.”
For a moment Inez wished her grandmother had lost the apron. Then the photograph could have stayed what everyone thought it was.
“Could we use my caption just for Monday?” she asked.
Elsie folded one apron tie across the other.
“No.”
“I won’t say the apron is the actual dress. Just that the blue stands for it.”
“Then use some other blue. This was my work. I won’t lend it for that story.”
Inez picked up the quilt. On the back, the date’s small stitches showed through the backing. She had sewn the numbers last, after she had joined the layers. Removing the blue square would mean picking them out too.
“You could use the yellow from mine,” Jo said. She had brought an old skirt for her own part of the display.
Inez shook her head.
“The year would still be wrong for this.”
Elsie took her apron to the living room. Jo began making tea. Inez stayed at the table with a small seam tool and a pair of scissors.
She tried cutting out only the final number. The thread caught in the backing. When she pulled, a small white loop rose with it.
She put the scissors down.
One stitch at a time, she took out the whole date. Then she removed the blue square. The cloth beneath was pale and full of needle holes. Near the bottom, one thread had pulled into a thin line.
It looked worse than a mistake on paper.
Jo came in with a cup.
“There’s more cloth in the cupboard.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to help?”
“I want to be annoyed for a minute.”
Jo set the tea out of reach of the quilt. “All right.”
Inez sat with the damaged square in front of her until her grandmother came back.
“Show me,” Elsie said.
Inez held it up.
Elsie rubbed a thumb across the pulled thread. “You could cover that.”
“Then no one would know why it’s different.”
“You can tell them.”
“I think I want them to ask.”
Elsie looked at her for a while, then fetched the apron.
“Beside it,” she said. “Don’t cut it.”
Inez took another sheet of paper.
She crossed out ONE BEGINNING on the old caption. On the new one she wrote about the photograph, the year she had stitched and the year her grandmother remembered. She wrote that the apron had belonged to Elsie’s first paid job, a year before the wedding.
“What was the shop called?”
Elsie told her. Inez wrote it down and let her check the name.
On Monday, a teacher helped Inez hang the quilt against a board. The old apron hung beside it, with its ties loose. Inez had not covered the needle holes.
A girl from another class stopped at the display.
“Did you forget that square?”
“I took it out,” Inez said. “I’d put the wrong thing there.”
“Why?”
She pointed to the photo, then the new caption.
Elsie arrived while they were still talking. She wore the same bright pin from the photograph.
The girl asked her what she had done at the shop.
“Mended coats, mostly,” Elsie said. “There was one man who tore the same pocket every month. I kept telling him not to carry nails in it.”
Inez moved her school bag off the spare chair. Her grandmother sat down and began telling them about the pocket.
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