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

Avery laughed suddenly, hollow. “Be yourselves. I don’t know what that even means. I don’t know how to be myself. I don’t know who that is.”

Hannah softened. “You do. Of course you do. You’re the person who’s giving me crap right back when I dish it out to you even though things are hard. You’re tough, Avery.”

“I don’t feel tough. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Very seriously. What if he loses his medical license? I know I’m not qualified to do anything that makes that kind of money. And I haven’t had a job in... It has been a long time.”

“What kind of job would you want?” Lark asked.

She looked blank. “I don’t know.”

“You could work at the furniture store, or a bookstore. That place down the road that sells candles,” Lark said.

“I said I don’t know,” Avery said, sounding frustrated. “This isn’t like an era of great new beginnings for me. I just feel lost.”

None of them said anything for a while. They got out their quilt squares, and Mary stared down at hers, at the white lace, brushing her fingertips over it. Perfection. That was her problem with this, wasn’t it? And she had always felt like it was only to do with her. The fact that she wanted to do the right thing for her girls. It’d been directed at her, never them.

She sometimes felt paralyzed by her fear she might look like she didn’t know what she was doing. She had never wanted her daughters to feel that way. It was why she couldn’t make a real stitch on this thing. She was just so afraid that she would make a mistake. And she...she had. Not on something as mundane as a quilt square. But with her daughter.

Her daughter.

Who hadn’t believed that she could tell her that she was being abused because somehow that would make her less than perfect, and if she were less than perfect then Mary might not feel the same about her.

“Do you know that I love you?” Mary said, looking from Hannah to Lark, to Avery. “Do you know that I didn’t need you to be strong all the time? To brush everything off and move on?”

“I don’t mind,” Hannah said, her tone flippant. But in it, Mary could sense the weight of pain. “There’s no point dwelling on crap anyway.”

Avery and Lark said nothing. “I don’t need you to be strong all the time,” Mary repeated. “I want you to be happy. I want you to be...yourselves. And I know that...”

“You had definite ideas about what happy was,” Lark said. “That wasn’t a bad thing. But... We know what’s important to you. And what you wished we would do.”

“I...”

“You definitely didn’t want us to end up like Gram,” Hannah said. “She was too emotional and thought only of herself. You wanted us to be stronger than that.”

“I only meant,” Mary said, “I didn’t want you to leave your children after you already had them.”

Hannah looked slightly stricken. “Well, sure. It’s just also, you had definite ideas about behavior and things like that. Anything that you thought seemed too much like Gram.”

“To protect you,” Mary said. “My mom’s life was not smooth. And I know that she came back here and made a relationship with you, but this was the best part of her life. All those years that she spent away from us... She wasn’t happy. She would come into town sometimes, and she was frazzled and upset over some man, or she was drinking too much. Her emotions were all over the place.”

“That doesn’t even sound like her,” Lark said.

“No. Because you don’t really know. I do. I know what it was like to have a mother who didn’t care at all. Who only cared about herself, and who came to visit only when she needed things. So no, I didn’t want you to be like her. And I know that you think you know what that means because you think you knew her. But you didn’t. I remember her... Just leaving me home alone all day. Going out to drink at the Gold Pan while my dad was at work. Forgetting to feed me. My brothers used to have to fix my hair for school because my mom would still be asleep. No, I didn’t want you to be like her. But that didn’t mean I needed you to feel nothing. To be strong all the time and keep everything bad and hard inside you.”

They were all staring at her like she had grown another head. “I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I’m sorry if you thought that. I was scared, but more for me than for you. Scared to lose you, scared... I was so scared maybe I had that in me. I don’t know why she left. To this day I don’t, and I can never ask. I was afraid it might creep up on me someday and I was vigilant to make sure it didn’t. On either of us. I wanted to be perfect, and wanting that so much, being so afraid of mistakes... I made it worse.”

It didn’t matter, did it? How much she had wanted to be a good mother. Because in the end, she had messed up. In the end, Avery felt lost, and she hadn’t been able to go to her when she needed her most.

“We didn’t know, Mom,” Lark said, softly. “I didn’t know that side of Gram.”

“I know. She changed when she came back and stayed. She stayed for the three of you.”

Not for Mary. Never for Mary.

But that didn’t matter. Not now.

“Avery,” Mary said. “We talk now. What do you need?”

“I need a plan,” Avery said. “The only plan that I’ve had for the last two years is to just... Hold everything together. And now it’s blown apart. Completely. So now I need to fix it. I need to do something.”

“Have you told your friends yet?”

“No. But his arrest