Read Online Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters by Jennifer Chiaverini - Free Book Online

haven’t seen him in years.”
    “Is that right?” For some reason Karen found this enormously depressing. They had seemed so in love. “What’s new at work? How is everyone?”
    “Don’t get me started. Last year we moved into the new building—you probably heard that—but hardly anyone’s happy with the office assignments. Riegert retired last fall, Donnie got married—” Lucy waved her hand. “You know. The usual.”
    Karen nodded, though she did not know and desperately wanted to. For years she had spent most of her waking hours with these people, but four and a half years ago, they had abruptly vanished from her life.
    “But what about you?” said Lucy, concerned. “How do you like the whole stuck-at-home-mom thing?”
    What could Karen say? “It’s everything I hoped it would be, and so much more,” she enthused, forcing a grin. “It was definitely the right choice for me. And … we usually go by stay-at-home mom, not stuck-at-home. It feels more voluntary that way.”
    “That’s wonderful,” said Lucy, relieved. “I really admire you. I could never give up everything I’ve worked so hard for.”
    “You’d be surprised what you can do when you believe it’s right for your family.”
    “I suppose so. I admit sometimes I envy you. It must be so nice not to have to work.”
    Karen kept her smile fixed in place and nodded.

Despite the swim lesson, Karen and her boys were not the last of the playgroup to reach the park. Janice and her four children did not arrive until more than twenty minutes after Karen parallel parked her compact car between the minivans already lined up along the curb.
    Janice’s three eldest children ran for the playground as Janice followed, carrying the oversized tote bag with their lunches and balancing her one-year-old on her hip. Though she was only five months into her pregnancy, she could easily pass for eight, a fact that had panicked her until an ultrasound confirmed that she was not carrying twins. Janice had said that whenever she took all of the kids to the grocery store, other shoppers regarded her with either profound sympathy or alarm. Once, a well-meaning elderly woman had taken her aside and kindly encouraged her to discuss birth control options with her physician, secretly if she had to, if her husband disapproved. At her last prenatal appointment, a pregnant woman struggling to amuse her bored two-year-old in the waiting room remarked that Janice was either very brave or very insane. Janice laughed as she recounted the stories, but Karen knew she had begged her husband to get a vasectomy two children ago. Whenever she was especially annoyed with him, she threatened to perform the operation herself.
    “Sorry I’m late,” said Janice, panting, as she spread out her blanket and settled herself and the baby upon it. “I got trapped in a phone call with the food police.”
    “What was it this time?” asked one of the other mothers, who was changing her three-year-old’s pull-up pants on a nearby blanket. “Peanut butter?”
    “No! God forbid. Even I know enough not to bring peanut butter. Peanuts can kill.”
    “You forgot to cut the grapes in half,” guessed Karen, who had committed that same infraction on her first turn to provide the morning snack for Ethan’s nursery school class, earning herself a lecture on hidden choking hazards from the room parent.
    “Your school is strict,” remarked Connor, the only stay-at-homefather in the playgroup. “We can bring anything except candy and soda.”
    “The food police aren’t official representatives of the school,” said Janice. “The peanut rule is a school policy, and understandably so, but the others have been tacked on by a few overzealous parents with too much time on their hands.”
    “So what did you do?” said the oldest mother in the group. She and her husband had been surprised by a late-in-life third child, and she regarded with bemused skepticism the innumerable new parenting