“She’s asking for someone named Helen. Every single day. Do you know who that is?”

The girl was maybe thirty-five. She had Vera’s chin. That same sharp little chin I used to tease Vera about back when we were seventeen and thought we had all the time in the world.

I just stood there in the middle of the quilting exhibit with people walking around me and I honestly could not make my mouth form words. I don’t know how long it took me to say yes. Probably not that long. It felt like forever.

I need to back up, because this doesn’t make any sense without the context. Vera Hutchins and I grew up three houses apart on Culbertson Road. We met when we were seven years old over a fence post. Her mother and my mother both quilted, and at some point in the early 1940s, during the war when there wasn’t much else to do in the evenings, they designed a pattern together. The double star. Two interlocking eight-pointed stars in a repeating block, and the trick of it was the way the points nested, which took a very specific cutting technique that my mother said she and Vera’s mother worked out over about six months of failed attempts. They made two quilts from it. One went to each family. And they never wrote the pattern down, because back then people didn’t always. You just learned it from someone who knew it.

Vera and I both learned it from watching them. By the time we were teenagers we could piece it together in our sleep. We made at least a dozen quilts between us over the years, sometimes together at her table and sometimes at mine, always that same pattern. We entered three of them in the county fair and won twice.

I’m not bragging, I’m just saying it was ours. It was completely ours. Nobody else around here had it.

So when I came around the corner of the exhibit aisle this past August and saw it hanging on the display frame, I think part of my brain genuinely just refused to process it for a second. I actually thought I was looking at one of my own quilts somehow. The colors were different, blues and creams instead of the reds and golds we always used, but the construction, the way the points nested, the specific way the center star floated inside the outer one. That was it. That was our pattern.

I leaned in to read the entry card. “Blue Morning Star, pieced by Claire Alderman, in honor of my mother, Vera, who is forgetting everything except the people she loves. She asks for someone named Helen.”

I read that last sentence maybe four times. Or maybe two times. I don’t actually know. I remember my reading glasses were fogging up a little because it was warm in the exhibit tent, and I kept having to blink.