The quilts. A story about the strangest way I was ever paid, and why it turned out to be the best. Names are changed, and some details are filled in.

After all the hard stories, I want to give you a happy one. Because this work is not all heartbreak. Some days are just wonderful, and strange, and you drive home laughing.

This is one of those.

My mom used to help me on jobs sometimes. She was a hard worker, and she was funny, and clients loved her, because she would talk to them while I worked. Some of my best jobs, she was the reason they went well.

One day we got a call from a lady I will call Dottie.

Dottie belonged to the Red Hat Society.

If you have never heard of it, the Red Hat Society is a club for women of a certain age, who have decided they are done being quiet and polite. They wear big red hats and purple outfits, and they go to lunch together, and they laugh louder than anybody else in the restaurant. It is wonderful.

And before you are old enough to be a Red Hat, you can be a Purple Hat. That is the younger version. Dottie had been a Purple Hat for years, and then a Red Hat for years after that.

So she had everything. All of it.

She took us upstairs and opened two bedroom doors, one after the other.

Red. And purple. Everywhere.

Hats, dozens of hats, with feathers and silk flowers and netting. Feather boas, in every shade of red and purple God ever made. Sequined jackets. Rhinestone pins. Purple gloves. Party decorations from every luncheon and tea and birthday they had ever thrown. Tablecloths. Napkins. Centerpieces. A ceramic statue of a lady in a red hat that was nearly as tall as my mother.

My mom picked up one hat that had an entire stuffed bird on it. A whole bird. She turned around and looked at me, and I had to walk out into the hall so Dottie would not see me laugh.

Dottie wanted her two bedrooms back. She had grandkids who wanted to come stay, and there was no place to put them.

But she did not want to give up a single feather.

That is a very common thing, by the way, and I want you to understand it. People want the room. They do not want to lose what is in it. The two things feel like they are fighting each other. So a big part of your job is helping them find a way to have both.

So we sat down with Dottie, my mom on one side of her and me on the other, and we went through it together. One hat at a time.

And every hat had a story. This one was from the trip to Branson. This one was from her friend Margaret's birthday party, the year Margaret turned seventy, and Margaret was gone now. This boa was the one she wore when she was crowned Queen Mother of her chapter. Did you know they have queens? They have queens.

My mom listened to every single story like it was the first time she had ever heard one. That is a gift, and she had it.

We built Dottie a system. Her very favorite things, the ones with the best stories, we packed carefully into labeled boxes, and they went into a closet she could get to anytime. A few of the most beautiful hats went up on the wall, on hooks, like art. The decorations she would use again, we packed for her chapter, so the other ladies could share them.

And the rest, she let go of. Not because we talked her out of it. Because she had kept the stories, and that was what she really wanted to keep.

We were there three days.

At the end of the third day, we were tired and dusty and happy, and it came time to settle up.

And Dottie did not get out her checkbook.

She said, Come with me, girls. And she led us down the hall to a big closet, and she opened the door.

It was full of quilts.

Handmade, hand stitched quilts. Stacks of them. Dottie had been making them for fifty years. Wedding ring patterns. Log cabins. Stars. Colors like you would see in a painting, every stitch done by hand.

And she said, I do not have much cash. But I have these. Pick.

My mom and I looked at each other. And then we started picking.

We walked out of that house with our arms so full of quilts we could barely see over them. I think I got ten. My mom got just as many, maybe more. We had to make two trips to the car.

When I got home, I let each of my daughters pick one. I put them away in a little chest for them, for someday. I gave one to my sister in law, and one to my mother in law.

And the rest, about six of them, I sold. They brought about five hundred dollars apiece.

So three days of work still came to about a thousand dollars a day. And my girls have something that will outlast me.

So here is what I want you to take from Dottie, if you are going into this business.

Be open to the deal. Not every client pays the same way. Some people do not have a lot of money, but they have a lot of value. If all you can see is cash, you will walk right past a treasure.

But know what you are taking. I knew what those quilts were worth, and I knew I could sell them. If you trade your work for goods, make sure the goods are worth the work. Be honest with yourself, and be honest with your client.

And respect what people love, even when it is not your taste. All those red hats and purple boas were not junk to Dottie. They were twenty years of friendship and laughter and lunches with women she loved, some of whom were gone now.

Your job was never to get rid of her memories. Your job was to help her keep them, and still have a room for her grandkids.

Some of the best payments in this business never go in your bank account. Mine are folded in a little chest, waiting for my girls.