Grandma's Quilt

I was strolling through that park where the high school girls hang out when my phone rang. “Grandma died,” said the voice on the other end. “Hey, who is this?” I said. Later, I’d find out it was my mother.

I was pretty sad when I found out Mom was being serious, and not just playing a joke on me, but not so much when the lawyer guy told me I got Grandma’s quilt in the will. She must have known how much I liked that quilt from the way I slept on it as a child, the way I’d nuzzle its cloth as a teenager, and that time I asked her, “Grandma, can I have your quilt when you die?”

It was her last gift to me, and I couldn’t help but feel warm as we packed up her things, stopping every once in a while to reminisce, or look at an old picture. It was during one of these breaks that Mom stood up, a weathered photograph in hand. “Uh, look at this honey,” she said.

“Is that--” Dad paused.

When I looked over my Dad’s shoulder, I saw a sepia tone version of Grandma smiling back at me, her arm draped around some guy that wasn’t grandpa. “Well look at that,” I said. “Grandma was quite the dish in her younger days, wasn’t she?”

“I think you’re missing the point,” said Dad. Mom was crying for some reason now, and Dad sat me down in Grandpa’s old recliner. “Look,” he said, pointing to the mustachioed  fellow with his arm around Grandma.

“Was that, like, Grandma’s boyfriend or something?”

“I don’t know,” said Dad, “But I sure hope not.”

He looked at me blankly, pointing still at the guy in the photo. “So--”

“So what?”

“Scott, that’s Adolf Hitler,” he said in an intense whisper.

“Oooooooh,” I said. “Who’s that.”

Dad just shook his head and told me to look him up. Turns out, he was a pretty bad guy, this Hitler. A real jerk. A bona fide turkey. And kind of a war criminal, too. It wouldn’t have bothered me as much if, upon further inspection, I hadn’t noticed that there, wrapped around my Grandma’s and Hitler’s shoulders, was Grandma’s quilt.

The next day, I was rooting through a box of Grandma’s things looking for money when I stumbled across a note. “Dear Enid,” it started. “As a token of my gratitude for your constant companionship over these last months, I’d like you to have my quilt. But this is no ordinary quilt, mein fraulein. “
Hitler explained that he had received the quilt from his Russian friend Josef something, and he had stolen it from a peasant farmer, who then froze to death. But the story doesn’t end there. As it happened, this peasant farmer traded his 12-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage for the quilt, along with some vodka and potatoes, to a 72-year-old British explorer named William Turlington. Turlington had gotten the quilt from his grandfather, the honorable Liam Turlington who, serving with the royal military at the Siege of Fort Pitt, was charged with inoculating the Ohio Valley Indians with small pox by means of several hundred infected quilts. Impressed by the beauty and comfort of the quilts, though, he thought it prudent to keep one for himself.

Now it was mine, and it would always be with me. Until the next day, when my apartment burned down, killing 34 people and several puppies not unlike the ones you see in calendars.