Confessions from the Quilting Circle by Maisey Yates (ebook reader color screen txt) 📕

marks on her head. It reminded Mary of Lark’s near daily tea parties when she’d been a girl.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been cut into tiny triangles, and milk poured into teacups. Lark had always been about the experience. Had always wanted even mundane moments to be parties. She’d guided and directed it all, and Mary had indulged it because when Lark was full of sparkle it was impossible to deny her.

Lark had brought something out in her then that she’d never been able to find before. Or since.

“Crowns!” Lark said.

“No,” Avery said, her lips firming into a line.

Hannah lifted a shoulder, then rooted around in the box until she found a crown with yellow flowers, which she perched on top of her bright red hair. “I’m here. I’m quilting. I might as well.”

Mary looked at her daughter. “You can’t possibly expect me to wear a crown while trying to do something I’ve never done before in my life.”

It was too easy to imagine herself. Her face wet with tears while her mom yelled at her about the ruined sampler.

She’d only wanted to learn to needlepoint like Addie.

It’s ruined now! Mary, why do you have to ruin everything of mine!

She clenched her hands into fists.

She could remember the yelling. Her tears.

I don’t have the patience to teach you and God knows you can’t learn.

And the next day she’d been gone.

Mary knew full well it wasn’t why.

She knew it with her head.

It was a lot harder to know it in her heart.

“Mom,” Lark said, heading over to the box and plucking out a delicate pink crown. Then she closed the distance between them, and set it on her head. “That is the best time to wear a flower crown. When you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. That’s why I wear one every chance I get.”

Her daughter’s eyes glittered, but there was something else there too. A something that had been there for years, that Mary couldn’t ever quite reach.

Lark had always been pure in her emotions. Mary had seen her daughter full of brilliant joy, and also screaming down the house in a rage. She no longer flew off the handle, but she was no longer pure in her joy either.

And Mary found herself keeping the crown on her head.

She had worried about Lark’s impetuous nature leading her to heartbreak. Had worried Avery’s desire for the finer things would leave her perpetually unsatisfied. Both characteristics had reminded her of Addie.

She’d worried less about Hannah, who had charted a course when she’d been a child and gotten right to work on meeting her goal. She had some concerns about Hannah’s happiness at times, because you never could tell, but when it came to life, she knew Hannah would be okay. She didn’t worry about Avery anymore. She’d been a silly girl in high school, but marriage and motherhood had taken that and honed her into the perfect suburban specimen. She was everything Mary had never known how to be.

Friends with other mothers, perfectly put together. A gourmet cook. Perpetually on the ball with her kids’ busy schedules, and took time to get manicures with her daughter on top of it. Actually liked getting manicures.

Mary might have had trouble connecting with Avery at times, but she must have done something right with her.

“Avery,” Lark said. Her tone was cajoling, but Avery was unmoved.

“No. I don’t go to costume parties.”

“This isn’t a costume.”

“Okay,” she said, still unmoved, taking a seat in the circle.

Mary sat next to her oldest daughter, and watched as Hannah and Lark moved some boxes around.

“There’s fabric in each of these,” Lark said. “I thought tonight we might go through some of it and choose what we like, and also go over some basic techniques.”

Mary felt that familiar sense of hollowness in her stomach. The one she often got when she was faced with an unfamiliar task. There were so many things that girls around her had simply known because they had grown up with mothers. She knew, logically, that there was no shame in not knowing how to do something.

But not having a natural confidante growing up had forced her to turn inward for strength.

When she’d collapsed on the ground weeping after her dad had told her Addie had left for good, he’d told her crying didn’t fix a thing. He was right, it didn’t.

So through growing up, through periods and hormones and liking boys for the first time she’d just stuffed it all down.

Joe had been the first person she’d ever shared her feelings with really. They’d met when she’d taken a job at a local ranch doing odd jobs when she was eighteen, and he’d been...well he’d looked like a cowboy to her.

And he’d been perfect. Sensitive in ways she never had been and strong in all the right ways.

Still, the feelings of inadequacy she had around all the “normal” girl things she’d never learned never really went away.

And it always seemed to combine with that last memory of her mother. The way she’d found her so unteachable.

She was sixty-five years old. She didn’t put a lot of stock into thoughts like that, not anymore. But even though the thoughts, the worries and the concerns had disappeared from her brain, they remained in the pit of her stomach.

Ideas could be unlearned, but feelings were a part of the very way your body was put together.

Lark pulled out the journal that she had that first day at The Dowell House. “This has the list of fabrics that Gram was intending to use. And they’re buried in these boxes. There are other fabrics too, but we’ll need more. Backing and a base fabric and all of that. But this is her drawing.” She held up a grid that made little sense to Mary. “And these are the fabrics.” She turned the page, and began to show the swatches. “There’s no information or anything on here, just titles.”

“How is this going to work?” Avery asked.

“We’ll each work on