The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward

The Half Finished Cap

Margie died on a Tuesday in October, in our own bed, with the window cracked the way she liked it even in the cold.

She had been sick a long time, so it was not a surprise, and that is a different kind of hard than the sudden kind.

The hospice nurse left a little after midnight. The house got quiet in a way I had not heard in forty-four years.

I sat in the kitchen until it was light out, and then I did the only thing my body knew how to do, which was put the coffee on.

Her chair is in the front room, by the window, with the good light.

Beside it sits her yarn basket, an old oak thing her mother gave her, and in that basket was half a blue cap still hanging on the needles.

She had been working on it the week before, on her good days, with the yarn balanced on her knee and her glasses down on her nose.

I could not look at that basket, and I could not throw it out, so for about three months I just walked around it.

I would come in from the barn and there it would be, the needles crossed, the blue yarn trailing off into the dark of the basket.

Some nights I talked to it. I am not ashamed to say that now.

I would say, Margie, I do not know what a man is supposed to do with all this.

Because the basket was not the half of it. There was the rest of her yarn, boxes of it, up in the spare room, enough to knit through a second lifetime.

And there was the thing she did every Thursday for nineteen years, the thing I did not know how to carry on, because I never knew how to do it in the first place.

I only knew how to drive her there. I was the driver. That was the whole of my part, and I had thought it was enough.