A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Chiaverini Jennifer

Author:Chiaverini, Jennifer [Chiaverini, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Gretchen

GRETCHEN DIDN’T MEANto eavesdrop, but it was impossible not to overhear Sylvia’s conversation with Summer and to deduce that Summer was displeased by the news of Jeremy’s surprise visit. Gretchen wondered if someone—Anna, perhaps, since she was his closest friend among them—ought to warn him that he might not receive a cordial welcome.

As the newest Elm Creek Quilter, Gretchen scarcely knew Summer, who had participated in Gretchen’s job interview but had left for graduate school only a few weeks after Gretchen and her husband, Joe, had moved into the manor. Gretchen had no idea how long the two had been dating, but she believed that they had lived together for a time, until some disagreement or another had compelled Summer to move out of Jeremy’s apartment. She wondered how any young couple could rebound and resume a normal dating relationship after living together, but she had seen couples with extraordinary devotion overcome even greater obstacles. She wasn’t sure, however, if Summer and Jeremy were one of these. They were both delightful young people, but that didn’t mean they were perfectly matched.

She and Joe, on the other hand—well, she could not have found a better, more loyal, or more loving husband if she had submitted a list of the qualities she most admired to the Lord above and had him made to order. They had met at church when Gretchen was an aspiring teacher, two years into a home economics and elementary education program at a small college that had awarded her a scholarship; Joe a machinist at an Ambridge steel mill outside Pittsburgh. He was a wonderful dancer, polite and respectful to her parents, and handsome enough to inspire envy in all but her closest friends, who loved her so much that her happiness was their own. On their wedding day, she had considered herself the luckiest woman alive, and after forty-six years of marriage she still believed that, even though life had not turned out as she had expected.

Their newlywed years had begun promisingly enough. Gretchen earned her degree and found a job teaching at a Catholic primary school, and she supplemented her modest income and Joe’s wages by picking up occasional housecleaning work from the same family that had employed her mother and grandmother as domestic help. Joe was too proud to bear this easily, so he worked long hours and accepted as much overtime as he could, determined to have Gretchen end her association with the privileged family that had employed hers for three generations. Inevitably, as soon as the couple got a little bit ahead, the car broke down or the furnace went out or the roof needed to be repaired, so they committed themselves to frugality and found their happiness within each other, hopeful that more prosperous times would come their way.

But all their hopes were shattered on the morning Gretchen’s principal came to her classroom and somberly informed her about a terrible accident at the steel mill. Joe had been taken to Allegheny General Hospital, unconscious and with a broken back.

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