Betty Lou’s heart raced when she hit send and she let out a polite squeal to herself. This was like firing the pistol to begin a race—one that would occupy quite a lot of time and attention from the OQA for the next twelve months. 

​

Their last several showings at the Simpton Family Quilting Extravaganza, better known as SFQE, had been a major disappointment, and the aging group’s confidence and general mood was reaching an all-time low. It was up to Betty Lou’s leadership skills to direct their efforts in this next competition and prove the OQA’s worth as a prestige group of quilters. 

​

She had led the gals through a handful of these competitions and charity auctions over the years, but never one that excited her quite like this. Sure, the SFQE regional competition, which occurred every other spring, was always well-run, and this particular event would contain its usual fare of highly professional quilts from across the western states, but never in Betty Lou’s nearly thirty years of competitive quilting had this prominent, nationally-renowned organization considered hosting an event so close to Ogden, Utah. It would take place practically in her backyard at the onset of spring, just when her beautiful state would begin showing off with pops of daffodils and tulips climbing through the last dying patches of snow. They’d welcome fellow competitors just as green grasses started painting the bases of the snow-capped mountains which guard the Wasatch Front and make the region feel like a secret place propped up and nestled nearly in the clouds. Betty Lou could hardly contain her preemptive pride and excitement to show off her home, as if she had carved and built the landscape herself.

​

Homecourt advantage! was Betty Lou’s first thought when she learned the competition would take place in Smithfield, just an hour’s drive away from Ogden. But then her mind turned to the very real and solemn obligation she felt to represent her community well. “The world’s eyes will be on us,” she would explain to groups of women in her Mormon congregation on periodic Sundays over the coming months. “I know you aren’t all quilters, so you might not fully understand just how monumental this is,” she had announced during a Relief Society lesson—a meeting for Latter-day Saint women. The topic of the lesson was missionary efforts, and Betty Lou, by raise of hand, managed to work in her group’s entry to the regional SFQE. She beamed with unintentional faux humility as she told them, “Some are comparing this to winning a bid to host the Olympic Games.” 

 

There were snickers.

 

“Mom, do you understand the reference?” Betty Lou’s youngest son, Matthew, asked her over family dinner after she had wondered out loud how the OQA would ever honor the SFQE’s theme, “I Wish I Knew How To Quilt You.”

 

“Reference?”

 

“It’s from Brokeback Mountain—it’s a movie about gay cowboys and one of them says ‘I wish I knew how to quit you’ to the other at one point.” She could tell Matthew was resisting an urge to laugh, causing her to suspect this theme was meant to be a joke of some kind. 

 

“Oh? Would Dad and I like this film?” 

 

“No,” Matthew answered without alluding to or describing any of the content his parents would have found to be too sexually explicit. 

 

“Darn.” Betty Lou passed Matthew a bowl of mashed potatoes she had overbeaten with a fork. “And is this film . . . is it important to you and your friends?”

 

“I don’t know, Mom. Sure.” 

 

Matthew’s coming out five years earlier had turned into a project for Betty Lou and her husband, Marvin. Matthew had explained he had waited until his mid-twenties to tell them because he wasn’t sure how they’d react considering their Mormon faith. They were determined to support their son. The next time he visited his parents, Betty Lou showed him she had cut out of a religious magazine a drawing of Noah’s Ark with a full rainbow spanning the sky above and had taped it to the inside of the living room window, facing outward. She eventually replaced this with an actual Pride flag, which Marvin propped in the flag holder at the front porch dutifully each year on June 1.

 

After dinner that evening, Betty Lou realized she might have some supplies that would be perfect for this project—supplies she had long ago packed away in her storage room.

 

The storage room in Betty Lou’s house was in the basement, just as in the rest of the homogeneous row of homes on the Ogden street on which she and Marvin had lived since Matthew was only four. They had built the two-story split-level house nearly thirty years before, with the kind of builder who gave buyers very little design choice and few options. “Bargain builder,” her friend Nadene had called it. “Great for when you need to build a home cheap!” 

 

Nadene hadn’t meant to hurt Betty Lou’s feelings, but she had done so anyway. No one would have known. Betty Lou smiled through it and made sure everyone understood she had picked the color for the main bathroom. “Soft peach,” it was called. “It’s quite popular right now. And the builder told me it wasn’t an option, but I just insisted,” she had told her friends. Betty Lou would cover that soft peach bathroom in coral-themed decorations. The wallpaper was printed with ocean fish, and a tasteful mermaid night-light was plugged into an outlet just next to the light switch by the door. 

 

“It automatically turns on when you shut off the overhead light,” Betty Lou would point out to any guest who agreed to a tour. “Just gives the room a nice feel, you know what I mean? And Matthew loves it. Comes in here just to stare at it about twenty times a day. I think he has a crush on the mermaid.”

 

The mermaid night-light would burn out some ten years later. Betty Lou would never bother to remove it, sure she’d get around to finding a replacement bulb if she could just remember to bring the old one with her to Haggs’, the local hardware/craft/bedding store. The burned-out night-light was on a long list of things Betty Lou needed to replace in the house—an overwhelming list for a couple with significant financial struggles that had only grown worse since Marvin was forced into early retirement due to severe migraines his doctor could never seem to explain. Betty Lou had taken a day job at a local grocery store to try to make up for the loss in income. In Betty Lou’s house, every penny was accounted for, and too many were double booked.

 

Betty Lou flipped the light switch at the top of the stairs before remembering that it, like the mermaid night-light, had burned out. The bulb was hard to reach without the precarious placement of a ladder in the middle of the set of stairs leading to the basement. Betty Lou had forbidden Marvin from attempting to switch it out when they first noticed the need two months before. 

 

“You’re not fifty anymore,” she had sniped at Marvin, who was retreating to the garage to replace the ladder he had just brought into the house and started erecting on the staircase. “I’ll call Matthew and have him come and do it.”

 

Marvin told Betty Lou on several occasions he resented their reliance on their son, the only of their children who still lived in the area, for these kinds of tasks. He complained that it seemed such a waste that by the time he retired and had time for the projects around the house he had neglected for nearly three decades, his body and his spouse started conspiring against him. Still, he didn’t mind having a new excuse to ask Matthew to come to the house for a visit. 

 

Betty Lou pulled out her cellphone to use as a makeshift flashlight and began slowly stepping down the stairs, leading on each with only her right foot due to some recent hip pain that wasn’t dissipating no matter how many giant fish oil capsules she had begun to consume every morning. The fish oil capsules were a recommendation from her favorite national AM daily radio show, “Advice with Dr. Klarkston.” She didn’t approve of Klarkston’s pervasive profanity, but she appreciated that each episode ended with a non-sequitur call for all to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, which Betty Lou figured cancelled out the “damns” and “asses.” 

 

When she stepped off the bottom stair, Betty Lou turned and opened the door to her long storage room. A cord that had been pushed by the opening of the door swung back to her face, where she caught and pulled it to turn on the space’s one dim light. 

 

The room was not large, maybe six feet by ten feet. Three walls were covered with shelving, which Marvin had installed only a month after the family moved into the house. Dusty Ball brand jars full of liquids in muted colors covered every shelf surface. Canned peach slices. Applesauce. Salsa. Prunes, some with sloppy labels that read “2010.” Betty Lou had preserved all this food over the years with every intention of rotating out her food storage supply, consistent with a directive she had received from Mormon church leaders when she began raising her children decades earlier. This was easier to keep up when her children were still small, but once the last had moved away it all seemed so silly to open a quart of strawberry jam just for herself and Marvin. Especially since Marvin was allergic to strawberries. 

 

Betty Lou carefully stepped over a few bulging cardboard boxes labeled “Christmas.” Tousled garlands poked through the tops of them, one catching Betty Lou’s nightgown. “For heaven’s sake” she muttered as she shook her hem free. “This year we are finally going to go through all of this and dejunk,” she swore without conviction, the way she had so many times before.

 

Betty Lou couldn’t help but notice it was becoming more and more difficult each year to crawl through the storage room to retrieve Christmas decorations or other supplies. She had increased the length of her morning walks through the neighborhood and had been living on rice cakes for months, but that didn’t seem to keep her from going up a size or two. 

 

Betty Lou had always been short and plump. “Big boned,” her mother had called her since a very young age. But once she turned sixty, just five years ago, it was like her metabolism had ground to an absolute halt. She tried to turn her attention onto the parts of her looks she felt she could control, like her hair, which she kept somewhat short and which she dyed dark brown on a regular basis. Betty Lou usually wore lumpy cardigans and sweater vests adorned with kitschy trinkets. She wasn’t known among her family and friends as a fashionista, but these same family and friends would routinely tell Betty Lou they loved her style—the way she presented herself felt cozy to those around her and they wouldn’t have wanted her to change a thing.

 

Having made her way to the back of the room, Betty Lou began shifting and stacking boxes, until she reached one in the far corner. As she lifted one box, she felt the bottom open and dump two dozen pairs of worn blue jeans onto the concrete floor. Betty Lou had collected these from her extended family members several years back. She had intended to use them to make a jeans quilt—a fad at that time—with her friends. 

 

Betty Lou had overestimated the interest of the Ogden Quilters Association that year, led by Leera Smeeth. “I’d like to think our skill level and standards are higher than . . . this,” Leera had said, pulling a bejeweled pair of Buckle jeans out of the box and wincing. Betty Lou didn’t sit next to Leera during quilting night for the next three months, even though they were partnered on a particularly challenging flag-themed piecework project at the time.

 

Betty Lou moved another box and set it on top of the open one that had spilled the jeans, which she decided not to pick up and reorganize. She shuffled one or two more around and then, right there, in the far corner, she found it—the box she had gone to the basement to locate. 

 

This box’s corners were dented. Faded marker across the top read “kitchen,” a callback to their move nearly three decades ago. Her fidgeting hands shimmied the box off the shelf, and she plopped it onto the floor, quickly prying open the folded cardboard pieces on top. Bright, colorful fabric lay folded neatly. Betty Lou had purchased it when her children were young, intending to make each of them puff quilts for their bedrooms. 

 

“I found just the happiest fabric. Should really brighten up their beds!” she had told Marvin, who fumbled through the new purchase, nodding. “Good find,” he said to Betty Lou before gently squeezing her hand. The fabric was placed in a box a year later and then forgotten.

 

Betty Lou shuffled through the box, her eyes misting as the contents reminded her of a time when her children were being potty trained. She never thought she’d miss having one of her kids crap his pants.

 

Picking up a piece of folded red fabric, Betty Lou smiled. There she stood amid the mess in her dim storage room with one light bulb in an ever-so-gentle sway near the door. She shivered a bit in her nightgown, drafty, although she never remembered that until she was down in the basement. She breathed in deeply, and ran her fingers over the soft cotton.

 

“It’s perfect.”