Finetta was beautiful and tall. She had hooded blue eyes like a sculptor’s Nemesis set in an angular face framed by thick dark hair that waved gently without curlers. She’d cut it to shoulder length and wore it clipped back like a schoolgirl. She was thin, as her mother was, with elegant hands that drew attention from her face when men were desperate to look somewhere else. She wore no rings – her failed marriage was discarded in the bottom drawer of her bureau.

The kettle boiled, the pot already warmed on the Rayburn. While the tea steeped she sat at her kitchen table, a quilt on her lap, and opened the sewing box. It was to have been a Christmas present for her mother but she’d almost finished it. One more patch to go. She could finish it this morning and give it to her this afternoon. It was probably better not to wait for such dates as Christmas or birthdays anymore – in the face of her mother’s deterioration they had become arbitrary. Who knew if she’d live till then? It was better to finish the patch now and give it to her before death crept any closer.

It was pretty enough, pieces cut from old dresses and curtains, backed on to undyed linen. Her mother would hate it but the nurses would think her ungrateful and keep putting it back on her bed. It gave Finetta joy to think of the confusion, the kind prison her mother was in. She rearranged the quilt to stop it slipping from her knee.

Starting something was easy, she thought as she adjusted a pin. It was the starting that was the joy when no mistakes had been made, when the world was free and open, when nothing was said that needed to be unsaid and there were no bad stitches. If life were nothing but beginnings with something else taking over the difficult middle and horrid end, how much simpler it would be. How much happier. People were not designed to change – God had not thought it through. They broke down instead, but what did God know? He who had made such a hash of it all. God was a trick made up by people too frightened to think of anything else. She spread the quilt over the table. It would do. Most of the mistakes were hidden under calico.

She poured her tea and arranged herself again at the kitchen table, the quilt on her knee. Her needle travelled back and forth through the patch of red silk dotted with white flowers and she kept her eyes upon it. She was used to the sharp sting of a misdirected point and though she’d done it – made patchworks, darned socks, mended skirts – a thousand times before, she still got pricked occasionally and it still stung.