A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jennifer Chiaverini Page B

as the impetus for maintaining their traditions, she doubted they would endure. Their traditional pumpkin patch trip and scary movie night the Saturday before Halloween had gone the way of the tooth fairy in middle school when Todd’s basketball practices took precedence. It had been ages since she and Tim had taken the boys to the Pancake Café before visiting Santa at the Elm Creek Valley Mall on the first day of Winter Break. Diane accepted these changes as the sad but inevitable consequence of her sons’ journey toward adulthood, and her nostalgia was tempered by the introduction of new, more age-appropriate activities. But Diane believed some traditions should not fall away as children grew. Some should have become so essential to their identity as a family that Michael, Todd, and Tim should look forward to them and nurture them as much as Diane did.
    And yet sometimes it seemed as if they didn’t care.
    Only two days before, Diane had gone out for coffee with some friends after their Pilates class and, upon realizing that she had completely lost track of time, had raced home to get dinner in the oven. Any other night and she would have pulled a made-ahead casserole out of the freezer, but on that night only one meal would do. Ever since she was a newlywed, Diane had made lasagna for supper the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. On that day in that first year of their marriage, she had asked Tim what he wanted for supper, and he had said anything but turkey. Diane had interpreted that tomean that he wanted the least Thanksgiving-ish meal she could devise, and she couldn’t think of anything that reminded her less of Thanksgiving than lasagna. As she shopped for noodles and ground beef, it occurred to her that salad was even less Thanksgiving-ish in that it was the opposite of a feast, so she added salad to the menu. Asparagus was a spring vegetable and thus likely not served by Pilgrims in an autumn of the days of yore, so into her grocery cart went a bag of frozen asparagus.
    Tim delighted in her explanation of the meal, and so it became a tradition: a supper with no logical connection whatsoever to Thanksgiving to cleanse their palates for the harvest feast to come the next day. Sometimes she varied the recipe— adding spinach or mushrooms to the sauce, substituting whole-wheat noodles for semolina—but it was always lasagna on Thanksgiving Eve. She enjoyed the whimsy of the tradition, and she thought the boys did, too.
    But that year she had lingered too long with her friends at the Daily Grind, chatting about their holiday plans and how the predicted storm might interfere with their travel. It was after five o’clock when a glance at her watch sent her racing to her car. She had prepared the lasagna earlier that day and had left it in the fridge, and if she had left instructions on the counter for Tim, it could have been on the table piping hot by six. If she had remembered to charge her cell phone, she could at least have called to have someone preheat the oven, but withher cell phone spent and useless in her purse, all she could do was hurry home and hope no one minded that supper would be a little late.
    But when she arrived home, she found Tim at the stove, spatula in hand, Todd setting the table, and Michael rooting around in the refrigerator. “Did you put the lasagna in?” she asked, still in her coat and boots, gym bag and purse slung over her shoulder. The smells wafting through the kitchen suggested ground beef and frying fat, without the least note of tomato or oregano.
    “Oh, hi, honey,” Tim greeted her, glancing over his shoulder before quickly returning his attention to the stove. “You didn’t answer your cell.”
    Diane set her bag on the floor and purse on the counter, taking in the scene warily. “The battery died.”
    Michael shut the refrigerator door with his shoulder, his arms loaded down with ketchup, mustard, a jar of pickles, and a plastic bag of buns. “See, Mom, there’s