The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward

Four hundred of them, carried up to that cold floor over nineteen years, and the very last one finished by the man who had only ever driven her there.

I carried it up myself. I did not wait in the truck. I walked onto the infusion floor, the first time in my whole life, and Carol walked me down the row of recliners, and I gave the four hundredth cap to a man about my own age, sitting there with a drip in his arm and a scared look he was working hard to hide.

I told him my wife made most of it and I made the crooked part, and he laughed out loud, and that one laugh was worth the whole long walk up those stairs.

The circle has not let it stop at four hundred. We are well past that number now, and climbing every week.

Every Thursday I load the truck, and I drive the eighteen miles, and I carry the sack up the stairs myself, and then I sit down in the circle and I wind the yarn, and these days I even knit a little, slow and lopsided.

I keep Margie’s pattern book out on the card table, open, where everyone in the circle can see her handwriting and her margin notes.

New women have come in. One of them is a girl of about thirty who finished her own treatment last fall and showed up wanting to give back the thing somebody once gave her. Donna looped a skein over her hands the first thing, same as she did for me.

I am seventy years old and I learned to knit in a hospital family room, and I did it because a woman I never met until this past January turned out to be the first person my wife ever showed that particular kindness to.

People ask me sometimes if it makes me sad, going back to that hospital every week, back to the place where it was all the hardest on us.

I tell them the plain truth of it. It is the least sad place I go all week.

Margie did not leave me a half finished cap. She left me a whole room full of people with their needles going, and a seat saved in the circle, and a job that needs doing, and I mean to do it until my own hands lock up for good.

And when they do finally lock up, I have no doubt at all that somebody in that room will pick up my sack and carry it on up those stairs, because that is how my wife built the thing, one cold head at a time, nineteen years before I ever once thought to climb the stairs and see it for myself.