“What’s that piece of fabric?” Molly asks, indicating the dotted Swiss. She’s been enjoying my stories about the pieces in the quilt.

“This is from your grandmother’s square-dancing skirt. There’s plenty of fabric, yards and yards of it, so I used it for sashing. Do you remember how she and Grandpa used to go square dancing?”

“Sort of. Maybe just from looking at old pictures, though.”

My parents were avid square dancers. They belonged to a club that held a dance the first Saturday of every month. I can still see them in my mind’s eye, my dad trim and dapper in a Western-cut shirt, with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, and a string tie. My mother’s dresses were outrageous confections. She made them herself, with yards of ruched calico or dotted Swiss draped over a pinwheel froth of crinolines. The dresses had puffy sleeves that sat like weightless balls on her shoulders, and she always wore these horrible little one-strap dancing shoes.

The sight of my folks in their square-dancing getup might have made me squirm, except that they were so damn happy to be going out to the dance hall together, to laugh with their friends and drink sticky fruit punch.

“They loved those dances so much,” I tell Molly, drawing a stitch through the sashing. “Grandma more than Grandpa, but he was a good sport about it.”

“I never saw them dance,” Molly says.

“Every once in a while, they’d have family night and we’d go.” Of course she wouldn’t remember that; she was in a stroller at the time. Still, I could see her swinging her tiny feet and clapping, mesmerized by the noise and the movements.

When Molly was in the second grade, my mother suffered a massive stroke. She was just sixty-four; it shouldn’t have happened. I took Molly to see her, praying my child wouldn’t act frightened when she saw Mom’s altered face, the left side slack and unresponsive, her neck encased in a cervical collar.

I needn’t have worried. Molly had happily rolled an ergonomic table in front of my mother and said, “Now you can play cards with me.”

The funny, sewing, square-dancing mom I knew vanished that day, even though she lived for two more years. Her personality changed, and dark anger emerged from a place we never knew was inside her. It was as if the stroke awakened a slumbering dragon inside her. She raged at how hard she had worked, and how frustrated she was that she hadn’t given her kids more. I constantly reassured her that what she’d given her family was enough. She always liked it when I brought Molly to visit her, though. Seeing her only granddaughter quieted the angry sadness.

She was supposed to get better with a long and rigorous course of physical and occupational therapy. She hated the therapy, though—squeezing a hard blue rubber ball, poking a thick shoelace through holes on a board to form the shape of a spider, walking back and forth between parallel bars. Most days, she refused to do any of it, preferring to let my dad tie her shoes and push her wheelchair. Her hands, which used to effortlessly knit Fair Isle sweaters and mittens and hats, closed around some invisible object and refused to open. Once or twice, she tried knitting again, but the yarn wound up in knots of frustration on the floor. The physical therapists told my father that in the long run, she’d be better off dressing herself and learning to walk on her own, but Dad didn’t listen. It was more important to him to do what my mom wanted.