State Fair Read Online Free Page B

horsehair into intricate patterns that were then fashioned into key chains, belts and hatbands. This year, to complement the African Americans Settle the West exhibit in the creative arts building, we had a section devoted primarily to African American-inspired quilts and wall hangings.
    “Hey, boys!” I called to one of the guys who owned Bears Quilt Shop.
    “Hey, Benni,” answered Vivs, the shop’s computer guru and a talented long-arm quilter. “Got some great new Western fabric from Alexander Henry. Check it out.” He held up a bolt of fabric showing cow-girls and boys on horseback talking on cell phones.
    “Cool! Save me a couple of yards. You know, we did try to use cell phones to talk to each other on our last roundup, but way up in the hills the reception was real sketchy.”
    “There goes all my romantic Western fantasies about rounding up little dogies,” said Russ, also dynamite on a long-arm machine. Many quilters in our local guilds hired him to machine-quilt their pieced tops.
    “You know, Russ,” I said, “it would take about two seconds at a real roundup to shatter any city person’s romantic fantasy about what goes into providing them with that juicy sirloin steak or stir fry. There is more manure and blood involved than most people realize.”
    He put his hand over his ears. “No, no, don’t tell me any more. I want to enjoy my tri-tip breakfast burritos.”
    “My lips are sealed,” I said.
    The museum booth was so busy it took me a few minutes before I could talk to Jazz Clark who was in charge of the cash register during this four hour shift. Jasmine “Jazz” Clark was the perfect example of what I’d been writing about in my grant proposals pertaining to the future of our folk art museum. She was nineteen years old and a talented painter and fiber artist whose story quilts were already starting to catch the eyes of local collectors. She was a sophomore at Cal Poly with a major in art and minor in African American studies.
    We’d become unlikely friends in the last few years despite the almost twenty years’ difference in our ages. We both lost our mothers when we were very young girls. Our relationship started one winter afternoon at the museum when she was sixteen. She’d become a member of our Artists’ Co-op because her “adopted” aunt and uncle, Jim and Oneeda Cleary, had recommended it to her dad, Levi, as a way to keep her busy. She’d taken to quilting like she’d been doing it all her life. She was hand-stitching a quilt in the large craft room and I walked by on my way to make some hot chocolate. I asked her to join me and over our cocoa in the co-op’s tiny kitchen, after a casual comment from me about how whipped cream on cocoa always made me miss my mother, she opened up her heart about how hard her dad tried to be both mom and dad to her, but how she always felt something was missing.
    “You’re so lucky to have Dove,” she’d said, sitting across from me at the round wooden snack table. She was dressed in jeans, hiking boots and a gray sweatshirt she’d hand painted with bright Van Gogh-style flowers. There was always something unique about the clothes she wore, some bit of lace or embroidery or grouping of antique pins that turned her simple clothing into little art pieces. “Both my grammas are gone. Bad hearts, just like my mom.” She sighed, poked a nail-bitten finger into her whipped cream.
    Jazz’s mother, Ruth, a red-haired Irish woman, died of congestive heart failure when Jazz was four years old. I’d met Ruth a few times but didn’t remember much about her. Jack and I had been in our twenties, newly married and didn’t hang around the same young parents’ crowd as Jazz’s mom and dad.
    I reached across the tiny table and patted her hand. “Yes, I was lucky. But you’ve got a wonderful dad and lots of other people who care about you.”
    She gave me a wide, heartbreaking smile. Her oval face was perfectly formed and her downy milk