Enough to Cover Us (Paperback)

Paperback. A uniform. A wedding dress. Sixty-four years of things nobody said.In January of 1947, in a mountain house so cold the bedroom window iced on the inside, Ruth Vollmer cut up her husband's army uniform and her own wedding dress and sewed them into a quilt. Fifty-eight squares of olive wool against the ivory satin. Nobody in that house ever said out loud what it was.Sixty-four years later Ruth is eighty-seven, a stroke has taken all but six of her words, and the quilt is folded on a shelf in a county nursing home in western Maryland, where the staff put it on whoever is cold. Nobody in the building knows where it came from. Ruth cannot tell them.Her grandson Wade drives up from Baltimore with a folder and a list of four things. The quilt is not one of them. He has never once thought about it. By the end of the week he wants it back, and Brenda Deitz, who has worked that hall for seven years, will not give it to him. Both of them have a claim. Neither of them knows yet what the cloth cost.ENOUGH TO COVER US moves between a marriage that came home from the Pacific and never discussed it, and the last five months of Ruth's life, when the only thing she can still hold is one gray patch at the corner of a quilt. It is a novel about what a family does instead of speaking, about the difference between keeping a thing and honoring it, and about what is left over when the people who kept the silence are gone.For readers of Kent Haruf and Marilynne Robinson. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…