Heartbroken, Donna couldn’t bear to plunge into a frenzy of wedding plans, so she made the excuse that she would be at quilt camp when Brandon’s parents were visiting. She hadn’t actually registered yet, but no one else knew that, and the little white lie stung her conscience only a little. Eventually she would have to steel herself and help plan a wedding, but for the moment denial was her only comfort.
Observing the Candlelight ceremony from her window, Julia had heard Donna confess why she had come to Elm Creek Quilt Camp. “As Megan told you, I came to camp to meet my internet friend,” she began, but then she fell silent and gazed around the circle as if weighing how much to divulge. “I also came because I’m a coward. My eldest daughter just got engaged to a young man my husband and I don’t know very well. I do know my daughter, though, and something tells me her heart isn’t in this marriage. It’s just an instinct, but I don’t think she’s happy—and all I ever wanted was for my daughters to be happy, happy and safe.” She took a quick, shaky breath and added, “I came to camp because it got me out of meeting her fiancé’s parents. I know I’m just delaying the inevitable, but I want to buy my daughtertime. It might be only a few weeks, but it might be enough for her to be certain that this is what she really wants.”
“Don’t underestimate your intuition,” another woman cautioned, but in the semidarkness, Julia couldn’t tell who had spoken. “Our maternal instincts are there for a reason.”
Others nodded and chimed in their agreement, and as Donna passed the candle to the next woman, it seemed to Julia that their words had comforted her. Megan put an arm around Donna’s shoulders and whispered something that made her laugh, even as she blinked back tears. Then Grace leaned closer, murmured, and gave Donna a knowing look. As the next camper in the circle began sharing her story, Julia found herself wishing she knew what had passed among the three women. By the time quilt camp ended, Julia had joined the circle of friends, so she too encouraged Donna when she resolved to convince Lindsay that finishing college would be best for her and her marriage in the long run.
In the weeks that followed, Donna’s misgivings about the engagement proved prescient. Soon after she returned home, her husband told her that at the dinner with the future in-laws, Brandon had bossed Lindsay around, telling her what entrée to order and advising her to go without dessert so she would look better in the wedding pictures. Brandon’s mother had been a meek and silent woman, his father loud and overbearing. Nothing Paul observed eased his or Donna’s concerns about the match.
Donna managed to convince Lindsay to return to campus for her junior year, but as the weeks passed, Lindsay seemed increasingly stressed and distracted, and her emails and phone calls became less frequent. When Donna, Paul, or Becca would ask her what was wrong, she would insist that everything was fine, and that she was just really busy. Donna didn’t believe it, and she began to think that she was to blame for their estrangement. Resolving to make Brandon feel more welcome, she invited the couple to spend Thanksgiving dinner together as a family. But although Lindsay eagerly acceptedthe invitation, she canceled only a few days before, making the excuse that she and Brandon both had too much work to do before the end of the semester.
“I feel like she’s pulling away from us,” Donna wrote to the other Cross-Country Quilters in nearly identical phrasing in her Christmas cards, as they learned when they compared notes. “I suppose this is natural, considering she’s going to be married in a few months, but it makes me heartsick.”
Vinnie strongly disagreed. “I don’t think Lindsay’s withdrawal is natural at all,” she fretted in an email to Julia, Grace, and Megan. “In my experience, weddings don’t wedge families apart, they bring them together.”
“Inmyexperience, that isn’t always true,” Julia responded, thinking of her second and third husbands, whose families she had barely known. But she agreed that something didn’t seem right.
Nonetheless, Donna looked forward to Christmas, for Lindsay had assured her that she and Brandon would come for the day. Instead, they arrived several hours late, exchanged gifts, and left abruptly after dinner. Brandon claimed that they were planning to have dessert with his family, several hours’ drive away, but Becca, suspicious, waited awhile and then phoned their apartment. Lindsay answered, and when she learned it was her sister on the line, she said she couldn’t talk and hung up.
As the weeks passed, Donna became increasingly anxious as she heard less and less from her eldest daughter. The Cross-Country Quilters offered all the support and comfort they could across the miles that separated them.
By then, Julia was in Kansas, filming on location forPrairie Vengeance. The daily annoyances and insults she and Ellen faced from Stephen Deneford and Rick Rowan were nothing compared to what Donna was going through, but they were bad enough. The latest humiliation had come from Deneford, who decided that Julia’s hands looked too aged for the quilting scenes. When the camera zoomed in close enough to follow the movements of her needle, it picked up “everywrinkle and vein,” as the camera operator tactlessly put it. When he pulled back far enough for Julia’s hands to pass for those of someone Sadie’s age, the details of the quilting were lost. Since there was no time to hire a hand model, Deneford’s solution was for Julia to wear gloves.
Incredulous, Julia explained that she couldn’t quilt with gloves on. “My hands are perfectly appropriate for my character,” she added defiantly. “Sadie was a frontier farm wife. She worked with her hands from dawn until dusk in every season.”
Because they were running late, Deneford resumed the shoot without asking her to struggle clumsily with gloves, but he warned that if he didn’t like the dailies, he’d have to resort to an alternative. Fearing that his alternative would be to replace her in the role altogether, Julia hurried off to her trailer as soon as they finished the scene. She called Donna, her loyal, long-distance quilting tutor, and asked her to be her stunt quilter.
“To be a what?” Donna asked.
“A stunt quilter,” Julia repeated. “You’ll fill in for me during all my close-up quilting shots, although I’m afraid only your hands will be on film.”
That was perfectly fine with Donna, who confessed some anxiety at the thought of memorizing lines. She agreed to accept the role on one condition: that Julia would find a position for Lindsay too, something suited to her education and theater training. She was an aspiring director, so any opportunity to gain experience working on the set of a feature film would do.
“I’m sure we can find something for her,” Julia said. “In the meantime, may I take the liberty of making your airline reservations?”
“As long as you reserve two seats.”
“I’ll do that,” Julia promised. “And Donna—it’ll be so good to see you again.”
It was only after Donna and Lindsay had been on the set ofPrairie Vengeancefor a week that Donna confided to Julia why she had been so eager to spirit her daughter away from Minnesota. In mid-January,one of Lindsay’s professors, apparently assuming he was calling Lindsay’s campus residence, had left a troubling message on the family’s answering machine expressing concern about her accumulating absences. Alarmed, Donna had phoned Lindsay’s apartment, but when no one answered, she had decided to check on her, and Becca had insisted on coming along. When they arrived nearly an hour later, Lindsay wouldn’t buzz them into the building. “You shouldn’t have come,” she had said, her voice muffled over the intercom. “Please go away before Brandon gets back.”
At those words, Donna had become even more insistent, and eventually she and Becca had convinced Lindsay to let them in. To her horror, Donna had found Lindsay’s lower lip split and swollen, her right eye a mass of fresh bruises.
Swiftly, they had gathered Lindsay’s most important belongings, hauled them outside to the car, and loaded them into the trunk. As her daughters had climbed into the back seat, Donna had taken the wheel and locked the doors, expecting at any moment to be blinded by the headlights of Brandon’s car as he tore around the corner and screeched to a halt behind them, blocking their escape.
Donna had sped off with her daughters before that could happen.
January had passed with bitter cold and heavy snows and no end to Brandon’s phone calls and emails. Lindsay flinched whenever the phone rang and refused to read her emails unless Donna or Becca checked first and deleted anything Brandon slipped past her filters. Paul implored Lindsay to press charges against Brandon, but she refused. She arranged a leave of absence from the university, but although she had been all too willing to forgo her education the previous summer, she now seemed to consider her withdrawal as evidence that she had failed her parents and herself.
Yet as the days had passed, Lindsay gradually lost the haunted looked in her eyes, and by the end of February she resumed some of her usual interests and activities. She went out with old high school friends who had remained in town; she visited the public library oftento check out books on stagecraft and filmmaking. She rented recordings of stage plays, which she and Donna would watch together and discuss. Each day had brought a new, positive change in Lindsay’s behavior, and only rarely had Donna overheard her crying in her room.
Then Julia understood that as beneficial as the job on the set ofPrairie Vengeancewould be to Lindsay’s future career, it was even more urgent to put hundreds of miles between her and Brandon. “Lindsay’s going to be all right,” she assured Donna emphatically. “If you wouldn’t mind some advice from someone who’s never actually raised a daughter—”
“I would never object to advice from a caring friend.”
“Encourage her to get counseling,” Julia said. “Gently, of course. It needs to be her decision. But in my opinion she would benefit enormously from talking to someone who can guide her through this crisis of confidence.”
Lindsay did seek counseling, and as winter gave way to the first signs of spring, she blossomed. She began as the assistant to an assistant, but before long, after proving herself capable and hardworking, she was promoted to production assistant. Even Stephen Deneford took notice of her, after some subtle hints from Julia. He told Lindsay if she wanted work during the summer, he could get her an internship at the studio.
