MRS. HOBB'S QUILT
By
Allie Drain
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PUBLISHED BY:
The Bearthology Collaborative Library
Mrs. Hobb's Quilt
Copyright © 2013 by Allie Drain
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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MRS. HOBB'S QUILT
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Sunlight streamed through the windows that were cheerfully framed by flowing gauze curtains and fell onto the wooden floor of a small office. The sunny room was empty except for two rocking chairs and a sturdy wooden table, on top of which sat a lamp and a well-worn sewing machine. It had once been the source of life and laughter in the simple house, but now the only sound in the room came from the rocking chair in the corner that groaned in time with the ticking clock hanging tiredly on the wall, occupied by a petite old woman with graying hair who watched the clock with watery blue eyes. Mrs. Hobbs sat, wrinkled and weary in her patched up blue dress, in the old willow chair, rocking it back and forth with her creaking ankles as the black hands ticked away the minutes and seconds and hours she had spent waiting. An old hand phone, still connected to the world by a thin wire, had been pulled into the room and now lay patiently by Mrs. Hobbs’s feet, poised to ring at any second. She rocked, her gaze beginning to flicker anxiously between the clock and the phone as the day dragged on. Back, she was watching the clock ticking away her time. Forward, she stared pleadingly at the phone, begging it to ring. Mrs. Hobbs wasn’t sure if she could handle another day of waiting.
A quick ringing brought her rocking to a halt. She glanced at the phone, as if disbelieving that the sound could be anything except her own imagination, before carefully bending over and picking the ringing object up.
“Hello?” Her voice was hesitant, nervous. What would she do if the news was the worst? A calm, sure voice answered through the phone.
“Hello. I was wondering if I could take a moment of your time to talk about a product I think you would like-“ Mrs. Hobbs set the phone back down, effectively hanging up on the talkative telemarketer. That wasn’t the phone call she had been waiting for. Anxious and tired of waiting, Mrs. Hobbs stood shakily from her seat and shuffled over to the table across the room. A half-finished project was strewn across the sewing machine and lamp, left there several months before when she had rushed to the hospital where her husband was slowly dying. It had been too painful to pick the project up again after his death, but perhaps, with this doubtful cloud hanging over her head, she could face it now. Maybe she could figure out how she had gotten to this point of anxiously waiting, and, if not, the distraction would be good for her nerves.
Sitting before the old mahogany table, Mrs. Hobbs switched the machine back on and prepared it, filling the empty bobbin and threading the shining needle, and, once it was ready, pumped her foot, creaking ankle and all, up and down on the magical pedal that worked the flashing needle through yards and yards of heavy, red cloth. In and out, up and down. There was a strange, entrancing rhythm to the needle’s movement. She fell quickly into the beat of the machine, getting lost in the musical humming of the mechanics. However, her left ear remained conscious to the real world around her, ready to pull her back the moment that phone rang. Her foot stopped pumping and the needle paused momentarily, poised to start whirring once more. Fiddling with the strand of milky pearls around her neck, Mrs. Hobbs leaned back to observe her work and, finding nothing amiss, gave a short, satisfied nod at the colorful masterpiece.
With a spotted hand, she reached across the mahogany table to pick up a square of yellow flowered gingham from a light wicker basket, and, suddenly, she was five again, when childish curiosity made the entire world new and exciting. When a four-room house with few creature comforts seemed like a castle of diamonds. When parents could do no wrong and were the most perfect people in the world, despite the odd-smelling glass bottles her father left shattered on the floor and the small paper sticks that made smoke puff out of her mother’s mouth. She was sitting on a beaten up sofa, watching her mother pump away at the sewing machine’s pedal at the familiar, old mahogany table that had been passed down from mother to daughter for generations. Swinging her legs back and forth, she watched with wide, blue eyes as her mother frantically worked to finish a customer’s order before they came to pick it up. There was still so much fabric sitting beside her mother’s feet. Perhaps her mother would make her a new dress of that pretty pink cloth, the yellow sprigged dress she wore was starting to become frayed and too short.
The whirring of the machine stopped and the sudden silence brought her back to the empty, sunny room, out of her memory. With slightly shaking hands, Mrs. Hobbs took a pair of silver scissors and snipped the red thread hanging between the needle and her project. She leaned down, her blue eyes looking closely through a pair of glasses at the red cloth to locate the hair-thin string, and, finding it, tied off the square and prepared the machine for the next one. Reaching back into the basket, she took a square and set it down where the last one had left off. She primed the needle, pushing down the machine’s foot, and started sewing once more, each stitch taking her back a year until she was…
…ten now and much more aware of the world around her. Especially the pair of shoes that squashed and stung her toes with each step she took and the red muslin dress that had become scandalously short in the eyes of her classmates, not that they would say that to her face, and left her bare legs shivering from the cold wind. But what could one do when their parents were fighting just to put enough food on the table for a family of five? Her little brother’s hand clung tightly to her own, trembling profusely as they waited for the shouts and crashes to stop so they could go inside. Hopefully they wouldn’t find their mother crying on the floor with more sickly bruises blooming on her delicate skin. That was the worst part. Seeing their strong, beautiful mother so broken. She heard her baby sister start to cry from the small crib inside, and, realizing there was no other choice, hesitantly crawled into the front room, past shattered glass and torn clothes and other miscellaneous items that had obviously been thrown across the room. For the moment her parents had moved their shouting match into the bedroom, and, for that, she was grateful. Leaning over to pick up her sister, she heard snippets of her parents’ world. The names. Oh, the names they would call each other! It was almost too much to bear. She covered her sister’s ears, trying to block out the awful words. As for herself, she kept her ears wide open, taking in every hateful word and feeding the angry fire that was growing within her, heating her cheeks which were wet with the cold crystalline tears that fell in drops from her eyes down onto that detestable red dress. And as she tried to comfort the baby sister her parents had ignored, she made a promise, a vow to herself and to God that she would never, ever turn out how her parents had.
By the time Mrs. Hobbs had stopped the whirring machine and realized that the red square blended in perfectly with the heavy crimson fabric that outlined each new patch, it was too late to undo. She had already sewn it on and had no energy or desire to pull out the stitching. Glancing at the clock, she noticed that an hour had passed as she was sewing. Still
no call. Well, it would come when it would come she supposed. But that didn’t lessen the impatience she was feeling. Mrs. Hobbs arched her back, trying to loosen her stiff muscles before picking up a satin blue square and returning back to her work, whirring out the beginning of a brassy chord.
She was sixteen. All grown up and ready to see the world, and yet here she was still stuck in her parents’ house and would probably remain there until she married someone. Sweet sixteen. No, sweet didn’t suit her. She was more like rebellious sixteen, willful sixteen, wild sixteen. Many years of living with her parents’ hidden disagreements had brought her back stronger and more willful than ever before, just in time for her friends to introduce her into the sensual and captivating world of jazz. Like all of her friends, she had cut her long brown hair into a fashionable bob and had donned the straight-lined dresses, secretly borrowed from her mother’s pile of customer orders. Soon