The Goodbye Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother is trying to work the newspaper Sudoku puzzle while her toddler, strapped into a little wooden high chair, makes monkeyshines to get her attention. He leans as far sideways as the high chair permits, makes a sound like a cat, bangs his fork on the table, crams dry Cheerios into his mouth and uses a chicken nugget to smear ketchup on his tray like a baby Jackson Pollock. The young mother tucks her hair behind her ear and fills in another blank space on the puzzle.
    I want to rush across the dining room and shake the woman. Can’t you see he needs you to look at him? Play with him, will you, already? It’ll be over before you know it.
    It’s easy to recognize a little of myself in the weary, distracted young mother. I used to be like her—preoccupied with matters of no importance, never seeing the secretive, invisible passage of time slip by until it was gone. Yet if someone had deigned to point this out, I would have been baffled, maybe even indignant. Disregard my child? What do you take me for?
    However, when you’re with a toddler who takes forty-five minutes to eat a chicken nugget, the moments drag. Or when your baby has the croup at 3:00 a.m. and you’re sitting in the bathroom with the steam on full blast, crying right along with her because you’re both so tired and miserable—those nights seem to have no end.
    From my perspective at the other end of childhood, I want to tell the young mother what I know now—that when a child is little, the days roll by at a leaden pace, blurring together. You’re like a cartoon character, blithely oblivious while crossing a precarious wooden bridge, never knowing it’son fire behind you, burning away as you go. Sure, everybody says to enjoy your kids while they’re little, because they’ll be grown before you know it, but nobody ever really believes it. The woman at the next table simply wouldn’t see the bridge, see time eating up the moments like a fire-breathing dragon.
    Fortunately for everyone involved, even I’m not crazy enough to intrude. For all I know, she’s got a load of worries on her mind, or maybe she just needs ten minutes to dream her own dreams. Maybe she craves the neat, precise order of a Sudoku puzzle as a reminder that everything has a solution. By the time she finishes her puzzle, the kid has given up on her and finished his Cheerios and nugget. She wipes his face and hands, scoops him up and plants a perfunctory kiss on his head as she goes to the register.
    Molly has missed the exchange entirely. She is absorbed in paging through the college’s glossy catalog. The booklet depicts an idyllic world where the grass is preternaturally green and weedless, buildings stand the test of time and students are eternally young, sitting around in earnest groups or laughing together over lattes. Professors look appropriatelysmart, many of them cultivating a kind of bohemian quirkiness that, in our hometown, would probably cause them to fall under suspicion.
    “See anything you like?” I ask as she pauses on a page of course descriptions.
    “Everything,” she states, her eyes dancing. “There’s a whole course called ‘Special Topics in Women’s Suffrage Music.’ And ‘Transgender Native American Art.’ ‘The Progressive Pottery Experience: Ideas in Transition.’” She struggles to keep a straight face. “I want it all.”
    We have a laugh, and I can feel her excitement. The catalog is a treasure trove of possibilities, new things for her to learn, ways to think, ideas about life, maybe even a way to change the world.
    Though I’m thrilled for her, I feel a silly twinge of envy. There are matters Dan and I can’t begin to teach her, I remind myself. That’s what college is for.
    “I have no clue how I’m going to pick,” she says, her hand smoothing the pages.
    “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” The admission masks an old ambivalence. I had always meant to finish college and even had a plan. For many people, this didn’t