Chapter 9

My funeral was on a Saturday with no sun. Ruth arranged all of it. The funeral home offered a standard white casket liner and she refused. She brought a quilt from the cedar chest at the foot of her bed instead — hand-stitched, ivory, seventy years old. I knew that quilt. She'd shown it to me the first Thanksgiving I ever spent at her house, the one where I cried in her kitchen and she pretended not to notice. "My mother made it for my wedding," she'd said. "I'm saving it for the day I go...