“Welcome Home” By David M. Taylor
The Challenge By Cesare Rosati It’s funny, the things you remember when you let your mind wander. The day before you left you were watching me fulfil my obligation after losing the bet we’d made following my comment about the quilt you’d been working on for nearly two years. I said I was tired of you cutting up all my old shirts for it. Shirts I was saving for when I worked on my car or in the yard. When I said that I thought you were never going to finish the damn thing anyway, you stormed out of the room and didn’t speak to me for hours. After you finally cooled down, you said, “I’m going to finish my quilt by next week. And, if I do, you’ll have to make me a pizza from scratch.” She’d never made a quilt before, and I’d been promising to make her a pizza from scratch, which, I’d also never done before. It sounded like a fair challenge so I accepted. Besides, I’d been watching her sitting on our porch swing, sewing pieces of cloth together after dinner for well over a year, and making very little progress. There was no way she was going to finish it in a week. When I got home from work the day following her challenge, I noticed that two more of my work shirts were missing. Three days later, when I drove up to the house, she was sitting on our porch swing, wrapped in her quilt. I couldn’t believe it. After parking the car in the garage, I walked into the kitchen, got a beer out of the fridge, walked out to the porch, and sat at the small table opposite the swing. I’ll never forget the smile on her face as she pulled the quilt tightly around her. I’d hardly finished my first sip of beer when she said, “I want it with sausage and pepperoni.”
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