A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) Read online

  When Garrett took a job as a computer programmer all the way in Seattle after college, I was so disappointed. I’d been hoping he’d settle down closer to home, someplace where he could come home for holidays or drop by on weekends. Now I was almost happy that he lived so far away, too far to get caught in the fallout as Rob and I flung accusations at each other across a battlefield barbed with betrayal and lawyers. No matter how bitter I was, I never wanted Garrett to feel like he had to take sides in all this.

  “Well, that sounds great, Mom,” Garrett replied, ignoring my commentary. “Do you know when you’ll be back? Where are you staying?”

  “Actually”—I smiled to myself—“I have no idea. I guess I’ll stay wherever looks good and come back when I feel like it.”

  I heard Garrett tap-tapping his finger against the telephone receiver. “Excuse me? Operator? Excuse me? There must be some problem with this connection. I just thought I heard my mother, Evelyn Dixon, President of the Boy’s Club Annual Benefit Auction, as well as the Altar Guild, the Children’s Library Advisory Committee, the Neighborhood Association, and the foremost list-maker in all of Texas, say that she didn’t have a plan. Someone must have crossed our wires.” He laughed, and I smiled. Even in my darkest moments, the sound of Garrett laughing has cheered me.

  “I know. It isn’t like me, but, as you’ve probably noticed, being myself hasn’t been working out too well for me lately. I thought I’d try being someone else, someone spontaneous and unpredictable.”

  “I see,” Garrett said with a television therapist twang. “How’s that working for you so far?”

  “Well, I haven’t even crossed into Rockwall County yet, so it’s a little too soon to tell. At the moment, I feel better than I have in quite a while, but it can’t last. Right about now, your dad is being told by some moving-company cowboy that I kicked him out and refused to set a date to move, which means it won’t be long before Rob will be calling my cell phone to ask if I’ve lost my mind.” I chuckled. “I don’t know. Maybe I have, but do you think I should tell him?”

  “Don’t bother. Bet he already knows. I always did,” Garrett teased, and then his voice became more serious.

  “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to get back to work, but I think it’s great that you’re getting away for a few days. You’ve got plenty of time before you need to move, so don’t worry about it. If it comes down to the wire, I’ll jump on a plane and fly out there to help you pack.”

  “Thanks, honey. You won’t need to do that; I’ll be back in plenty of time to move, but I appreciate the offer.”

  I hit the end button on the phone. Glancing into the rearview mirror across the pancake-flat landscape, I could see the downtown skyline marked by air-conditioned temples of commerce shrinking in the distance. I turned up the volume on the radio, drowning out the tinny, computer-generated version of “Your Man” that always played on my cell phone when Rob called, and kept driving northeast.

  The young policeman stared, waiting for me to answer the question.

  “What brings me to Connecticut? Just a whim.” I shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to see the fall foliage.”

  He nodded slowly, probably wondering if he should have me take a Breathalyzer test but apparently deciding against it. Maybe I reminded him of his mother.

  “Well, I’m sorry your vacation is starting off on a sour note,” he said as he wrote, “but as fast as you were going, I really don’t have a choice.” He tore the ticket off the pad and handed it to me.

  “Welcome to New England, Ms. Dixon.”

  2

  Evelyn Dixon

  Standing in the middle of downtown that day and turning in a slow circle, I decided that New Bern, Connecticut, looked exactly as a New England village should. I still think so.

  The tallest building in town is the Congregational Church. It stands at the narrow, western end of the Green, an imposing façade that dominates the landscape, as if anchoring the town to the Almighty, reminding the residents of the meaning of the word “omnipresent.” With its evenly spaced doors and windows aligned beneath the exact center of a white wooden belfry, it is a monument to symmetry. Next to it, and painted in the same simple white clapboard as the church, stands a line of antique homes, probably from the late eighteen hundreds, on smallish lots. They are nearly identical, two-storied and rectangular in shape with wide porches and high-pitched roofs and, at least in comparison to the grand mansions that line the village’s main east/west residential street, Elm, rather modest.

  The lots on Elm are large, some measured in acres instead of feet, and the homes sitting on them represent a variety of architectural styles—Colonials, Federals, Greek Revivals, and Victorians. Historic plaques on the homes list dates of construction stretching from pre-Revolutionary times to post–Civil War, the most recent having been built in 1902. Walking down the sidewalk on an autumn afternoon, under a canopy of red gold maple leaves shot through with shafting sunbeams, you half expect a man in a tall beaver top hat and morning coat, or a woman wearing hoopskirts and pulling on hand-tatted lace gloves, to open the gate in one of the white picket fences and wish you good-day. New Bern is a town with an active and powerful historic preservation society, and it shows.

  There is little distance or demarcation here between residential and commercial; people who live in town are within easy walking distance of New Bern’s businesses, a small but diverse collection of restaurants, galleries, antique shops, and boutiques housed in two-story brick storefronts with hand-painted signs. There isn’t an inch of neon on New Bern’s main commercial street, aptly called Commerce. And even though the village shops clearly cater to the tourist trade (you’d be hard-pressed to buy a quart of milk or packet of shoelaces in the village; all those mundane but necessary transactions take place in charmless cinderblock buildings along the state route leading out of town), there is a feeling of authenticity to the place.

  Taking a quick walk around, perusing the village before deciding how to spend the rest of my day, I was pleased to see there was nothing too precious or souvenirlike for sale in the store windows, no T-shirts claiming that the wearer’s girlfriend, husband, or grandma went to New Bern and all they got was a lousy T-shirt, and none of the merchants had dubbed their boutiques a “shoppe.” I was looking forward to poking through the stores, but my rumbling stomach insisted that lunch come first.

  There were three or four restaurants to choose from, and all of them looked nice, but I settled on a place called the Grill on the Green. Though it was still early, the restaurant was packed, and I had to wait for a few minutes to be seated. Waiting for my table, I noticed that while many of the customers were obviously tourists (the shopping bags and cameras gave them away), the handsome, gray-haired gentleman who was seating diners greeted many by their first names, kissing the ladies on the cheek and exchanging hearty handshakes and laughter with the men. Clearly, the restaurant was a favorite of locals as well as visitors. It was easy to see why; the atmosphere was elegant but relaxed, with brick red wainscoting running beneath walls painted a warm yellow. The simple black Windsor chairs looked cozy around the white-clothed tables. And the food? To die for! The chicken and endive salad I ordered was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Normally, I hate eating alone; it always makes me feel so conspicuous. But with the French patio doors at the front of the restaurant open to catch a warm, fall breeze, a pleasant buzz of conversation in the background, and a great glass of pinot grigio to sip, I found myself smiling for the first time in a long time.

  The waitress brought me a cappuccino to finish my meal. “So, are you up from New York for the day?”

  “Texas, actually. I took a room at the Inn for a few days. I’ve always wanted to see the fall colors.”

  “Texas?” she commented, looking at me with interest before placing the cup on the table. “That’s a long way. Well, you picked the perfect time for it. The weather’s beautiful. We’ll be packed this weekend, that’s for sure.”

  “I noti
ced. Do you always have so many tourists?”

  She shook her head and put a ceramic container filled with pink, blue, and white sugar packets down near my cup. “We’ve always got a steady stream of weekenders from New York, but we’re too far from the city to be a big tourist destination—not like the Hamptons or anything. Which is fine with me.” She grinned. “I went to East Hampton for the weekend once and I couldn’t wait to get home—too many people! Here, we’re busy in the summer, and, of course, we get a lot of visitors now, during leaf season, but that only lasts a few weeks. Most businesses make seventy percent of their income in about three months’ time. Things get pretty quiet after that.”

  “Doesn’t that make it hard to make a living?” I asked.

  The waitress shrugged. “In a way, I guess. If we run into a summer with bad weather, and the tourists stay home, it can be tough, but I’ve lived here all my life and always managed. Probably I’d make more money if I lived somewhere else, but New Bern is a good place to raise my kids. Can’t see that making more money would make me any happier, so I guess I’m here to stay.”

  We had been talking for quite a while. Standing near the bar, the maitre d’ shot the waitress a look that reminded her she had other tables.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?” she asked quickly.

  “No, thank you. Just a check.”

  She pulled the already-prepared bill out of her black apron pocket and placed it on the table. “It was nice talking to you,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your trip. If you get a chance, drive over to the nature preserve and walk the trails. They’re real pretty this time of year.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  I’d planned to do some window-shopping after lunch, but changed my mind when a motor coach pulled up and disgorged a swarm of camera-wielding senior citizens onto the sidewalk. Instead, I crossed the street and took a walk on the Green, hoping the crowd of seniors would disperse by the time I returned.

  The Green, I soon learned, is just a quaint word for a municipal park that marks the center of town and is a fixture in most New England villages. In New Bern, the Green is a block wide and three blocks long. Commerce and Elm Streets run on its long, east/west edges; Maple and Church streets bound the shorter sides. Those four are the most important thoroughfares in town, though I would later learn that Proctor Street, which parallels the back side of Elm, is where the real mansions are. Those homes, owned by old Yankees with old money, with layers of trees and hedges to camouflage them from prying eyes, don’t look like much from the road. But once you get past the overgrown shrubbery you’ll discover grounds dotted with tennis courts, swimming pools, and carriage houses surrounding stately, enormous homes that rarely change hands. The owners’ last names match those of the oldest headstones in the cemetery. In this part of the world, amassing a great fortune is considered admirable; flaunting it is not.

  I took my time strolling through the Green, gazing up at the tapestry of brilliant-leaved trees. Some, towering overhead like massive columns, had obviously been there for decades if not centuries. Others, more recently planted, with slender, pliable trunks, were scattered haphazardly on the carpet of grass. Hardy yellow and orange mums mounded in indiscriminately placed flowerbeds near bushes of purplish hydrangeas at their peak and leggy geraniums that were far past it. But for the sidewalks cutting through the park at tidy right angles until they met at the granite memorial to the Civil War dead, the Green would have given the impression of nature run amok. Instead, the feeling was one of humanity imposing order upon nature, but lightly, respectfully, recognizing that, while they might adapt and make use of the natural world, the people of New Bern weren’t so arrogant as to suppose they could control it.

  It’s like a quilt, I thought to myself as I approached the war memorial. All the different patches of green coming together to make a whole. That’s why I feel so comfortable here.

  I’d made my first quilt twenty-five years before, when I was expecting Garrett. From that moment on, I was hooked. I love quilting, the sheer geometry of it, the endless patterns and combinations that can be achieved by the arrangement and rearrangement of something as simple as a straight line. The order and precision of quilting appeals to that part of me that wants a refuge from life’s chaos, while the unbounded possibilities of color, fabric, and finishing speak to the part of me that wants to live life surprised. The most wonderful thing about quilting is that if a whole stadium full of people were to make a quilt in the exact same pattern, no two of those quilts would be alike. No matter how untutored or timid she may be, when it comes to quilting, everyone is an artist. Expertly, or innocently, or inadvertently, the quilter cannot help but reveal something true.

  That’s what I was feeling as I left the Green and joined the dwindling groups of shoppers enjoying the last lazy rays of sunlight on that fall afternoon: that I had stumbled upon something true, a town completely and unapologetically itself. No one here would think of digging a river where nature hadn’t seen fit to put one in the first place, trying to impose some counterfeit, saccharine-quaint overlay of what someone in Corporate thought the landscape should look like based on the most recent polling numbers and focus groups. Here, the sidewalks were uneven in spots, and tufts of grass sprouted insistently between the cracks. Walking past the Grill on the Green, where clutches of diners lingered over coffee and dessert, I looked up and saw that the hand-painted wooden sign suspended overhead had spots of chipped paint, scars from a hailstorm. No one had thought to touch it up after the ravages of winter, trying to restore it to some ideal of pristine perfection. The residents and merchants of New Bern weren’t striving to achieve perfection, because they understood it was the imperfections that made their village perfect, because that was what made it real.

  One of the first bits of wisdom imparted to a novice quilter is that the Amish, who make some of the most simple but exquisite quilts in the world, purposely plan a mistake into each of their projects because they believe attempts at human perfection mock God. Of course, any quilter knows that you don’t have to plan for imperfections in your work; they come quite naturally on their own, so I don’t know if this bit of Amish folklore rings true or not, but the idea does.

  If there were such a thing as human perfection, it would mean that there was one ideal; one standard for beauty, one right answer to every question. And maybe, for the Mr. Lindsays of the world, the people who can’t see any difference between a real river and a freshly dug one, who can’t understand why someone would go to all the trouble of stitching a quilt by hand when you could make one faster on a machine, or better yet, buy one cheap from the discount store for $49.95, which is less than you’d pay for the fabric; maybe for those people there is some universal ideal. Maybe they simply can’t recognize the sublime splendor of imperfection. But I bet the Amish do, and the young waitress who thinks a smaller paycheck is a fair trade for happiness, and whoever owns the sign over the restaurant and lets the chipped paint stay chipped because they realize that tradition and endurance are what ultimately bring us to perfection. They understand. So do I.

  Maybe that’s why, after only a few hours in this little village, I felt more at ease here than I did after twenty years of living in a suburban planned development.

  How odd, I thought as I opened the door of the antique store I’d been browsing in and waved in response to the owner’s farewell, to be surrounded by strangers and feel so at home. If I believed in past lives, I might think I’d spent one in New Bern. Of course, that couldn’t be. There’s no quilt shop here, and even in reincarnation I can’t see me spending a whole lifetime without a place to buy fabric. If not for that, I’d never want to leave.

  It was nearing five o’clock, and some of the shopkeepers were locking up. I was almost at the end of Commerce Street and had investigated every shop. Tomorrow I planned to take the young waitress’s advice and spend the day hiking through the nature preserve, so I knew I should go back to the Inn and turn in early,
but I really didn’t want to. I wanted to make the day last. There was a bakery on the corner with a sign that promised fresh cookies and strong coffee. People were still coming in and out the door. I wasn’t really hungry, but lingering over a cup of coffee seemed a good way to prolong the afternoon.

  The sun was beginning to dip lower in the sky, and it was getting chilly. I shoved my hands in my coat pockets as I hurried toward the bakery. I’d almost reached the door when I heard a bird chirrup that sounded surprisingly close and loud.

  If the bird hadn’t called at the moment it did, I’d have missed it entirely, but when I turned my head to see where the noise came from I noticed an opening between the two buildings I’d just passed. It was an alley paved with old-fashioned cobblestones, wide enough to allow people to pass on foot but too narrow for a car. A faded sign posted on a brick wall announced that this was Cobbled Court, and an arrow beneath pointed the way in.

  There weren’t any lights in the alley. Even if there were any shops down the passageway, they were surely closed by now, but curiosity got the best of me. Ignoring the damage that the uneven cobbles were inflicting on my high heels, I set out to investigate the passage that, in all probability, led to nothing more interesting than back doors where shopkeepers piled their empty shipping crates and trash cans. But that’s why you mustn’t bet the bank on probability; sometimes it’s better to follow your instincts.

  The dark, narrow passageway ended abruptly, opening onto a generous, cobbled square large enough to let a wide column of light stream into the center. When I stepped out of the dim alleyway and into the light-filled courtyard, it felt like I was passing into a secret world, a place that didn’t exist before I discovered it.