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well the night before, as I rarely did on nights I was with Jesse. After the movie, we’d gone back to his place so he could be home in time to put Allie to bed. Jesse and I would take turns telling her stories and then, when we were sure she was asleep, we’d retire to his bedroom. Problem was, neither Jesse nor I were sure how Allie would feel if she found me there in the morning, and we weren’t ready to find out. So it had become my routine to spend the first part of the night at his house, then drive back to mine and catch the last few hours of sleep in my own bed.
    “Maybe you can make an early night of it,” Eleanor suggested as she saw me yawn a second time. “I’m sure the girls won’t mind if you miss the meeting.”
    It was Friday, which meant our weekly quilt meeting. And while I loved hanging out with the members of the group, I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and close my eyes. But I knew that on this particular Friday, I couldn’t.
    “The quilt show,” I reminded Eleanor. “If I’m going to get it together I’ll need everyone to start helping tonight. Even with help I have no idea how I’m going to manage.”
    “Well, you shouldn’t volunteer for things if you don’t have the time.” I could see the corners of her lips turn up as she tried not to laugh.
    I threw a skein of decorative yarn at her, which she caught and dropped on the desk.
    “Wasn’t someone going to get coffee?” she reminded me.
    I sat on the chair opposite her. “That would be great, Grandma. I’ll take mine black.”
    She met my smile with one of her own. “I guess I deserved that.”
    “That’s almost an apology. What’s your angle?”
    “No angle. I just realized that I should enjoy you while I can. Once you’re a bride-to-be, you’ll be too busy for your old grandma.”
    “It does take a lot of time, planning a wedding.”
    “It can. You and Jesse will try to keep it simple, I imagine, but these things have a way of becoming big and complicated.”
    “Was your wedding big and complicated?”
    “No. It was your grandfather, a minister, my sister and parents, and his brother. We got married in the church at ten in the morning and then we all went to lunch.”
    “Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
    “Niagara Falls.”
    “Was it nice?”
    “It was a honeymoon. It would be a crying shame if it wasn’t nice. And yours will be nice, too.”
    “So you and Joe were in love?”
    “Yes. We were very young. I was eighteen. He was twenty. We didn’t know a thing about what marriage really was, but we were in love.”
    “What was he like?”
    She leaned back in her chair. “He was a football player in high school, so he had a strong build. He was very athletic. He played baseball and tennis, and really any sport he was interested in. And he was good at all of it. He liked to watch them, too. He used to take me to New York to see Yankees games and tell me how his dad had seen Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig play. He knew all the statistics. We used to have so much fun.”
    “That’s where you got your love of baseball,” I said. The only time I’d ever heard my grandmother swear was when the Yankees lost to the Red Sox in extra innings. “What else did he like?”
    “Lots of things. He was smart. Not an intellectual, but he had a curious mind. He was good at reading people. He could tell if someone was ready to buy insurance or wasn’t.”
    “That’s right, he sold insurance. I’d forgotten that.”
    “And he was popular. He knew everyone. We’d walk into a store and he’d know the owner, the owner’s wife, the owner’s dog.” She laughed. “It was strange when I first moved to Archers Rest because nobody knew him. That’s when I realized he was really gone.”
    Joe, my grandfather, had been dead since my mother was six and my uncle Henry was five. There were photos of him in my grandmother’s bedroom, but she rarely spoke about him, and growing up, I never heard my mother mention his