The Wedding Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini Page A

annoying, I know it’s hard, but it won’t be much longer.”
    The wait seemed interminably long, but at last she was taken back to the birthing suite where she had labored so long. Gretchen was waiting, and as a nurse attended to Sarah, two aides entered, pushing two contraptions that Sarah could best describe as tall, wheeled bassinets. Above the edge of one, Sarah glimpsed a tiny pink fist waving in the air, and she gasped out a happy sob. Her babies, at last. Her children.
    Then Sarah was allowed to hold them, one at a time, while a nurse stood at her side watching attentively, since Sarah was still recovering from the anesthesia. “We’re filling out the birth certificates,” another nurse asked. “Do you have names for the children?”
    â€œYes, please do divulge the secret at long last,” said Sylvia, seated on the sofa with the baby boy in her arms. Beside her, Gretchen held out a fingertip for the child to grasp with a tiny fist. “You’ve been keeping us in suspense for ages.”
    â€œNot ages,” said Sarah. “Only nine months.”
    â€œPlease tell me you haven’t selected any of those silly names you were teasing us with before,” said Carol, leaning over to tuck a corner of the soft striped blanket out of the way so she could better see her granddaughter’s sweet face. Sarah smiled, knowing her mother longed to wrap the babies in the pink-and-white and blue-and-white Sawtooth Star quilts she had painstakingly made for them, the first and second—and only—quilts she had made in her brief career as a quilter. Sarah was saving them for the babies’ trip home to Elm Creek Manor.
    â€œYou mean Barnum and Bailey?” said Matt, who had just returned from the waiting room where he had shared the good news with Andrew and Joe. They had accompanied him into the birthing suite, looking as pleased and proud as if they truly were the baby’s great-grandparents. “Peas and Carrots? Skipper and Gilligan?”
    â€œThat last one’s not so bad,” Andrew mused, mostly to see the look of alarm on Carol’s face.
    â€œBagel and Schmear was always my favorite,” Sarah remarked, but considering how attentive and helpful her mother had been throughout that long, difficult day, she couldn’t bear to torture her a moment longer. “Yes, we’ve chosen names. Sylvia’s holding James Matthew, and this little sweetheart is Caroline Sylvia.”
    A gasp of delight and recognition went up from the gathered friends, and Sarah thought she spotted tears of pride behind the loving smiles of the two women who had lent their names to the newborn girl. And their son, called James after Sylvia’s first husband and Matthew for his father—he, too, had a proud, honorable name that paid tribute to the McClure family as well as the Bergstroms. In the years since Sarah had moved to the Elm Creek Valley, the Bergstroms had come to seem like a second family to her, although she knew them only through Sylvia’s stories and the quilts and words they had left behind.
    The parents, grandmother, and honorary great-grandparents took turns cuddling the babies and phoning absent friends to share the happy news. Two healthy, beautiful babies and a healthy, relieved mother—in all their lives Sarah and Matt had never had better news to share.
    A lactation consultant arrived to help Sarah nurse her children. That first feeding went less well than she had hoped—not at all like the blissfully easy, natural process described in the books stacked on her nightstand back home—but the consultant assured her that the babies were probably not very hungry so soon after their birth, and by the time her milk came in and her babies were ready, she would have it all figured out.
    Sarah had never felt less certain that she had anything all figured out, but surrounded by some of the people she loved best in the world and knowing