The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward

I said that I was. I said I had brought Margie’s yarn, that I did not know what else to do with it, and I had thought maybe somebody up here could still use it.

My voice came apart a little on the word yarn. It had not come apart at the funeral, not once, not in front of the whole church. It came apart in that doorway in front of six women I had never met.

Nobody made a thing of it. The woman in the red cardigan just nodded, like she had expected that too, like she had seen it before in people who come to that floor.

One of the younger women got up and pulled an empty chair into the circle, into a gap they had left open, and she said, come and sit down, we have been hoping you would come up here one of these days.

I said I was only dropping off. I think I said it twice. I am a man who waits in the truck. That is who I have always been.

But my feet carried the basket on into the room, and the woman in the red cardigan reached in and lifted out the half finished blue cap, the one that had been sitting on Margie’s needles since October, untouched.

She held it up to the window light and turned it over in her fingers, gentle, and she said, soft, almost to herself, this one just needs another inch.

Learning to Wind

I sat down. I will not pretend I knew what on earth I was doing there, a seventy year old man in a room full of knitting women, but I sat myself down in that empty chair they had pulled in.

They told me their names and I lost most of them in the first minute, the way you do when your ears are ringing.

Carol, the charge nurse, put her head in the door to say hello, and she knew me, and she came and took my hand in both of hers and held it a second and did not say anything at all, which was exactly the right thing to say.

The women explained it to me the slow way, the way you explain a thing to a man who is going to be slow to come to it.

They met every Thursday in the family room. They knitted caps. They gave the caps to the floor, same as Margie always had, and the nurses handed them out to the patients in the recliners.

I asked how long they had been at it, because I had truly believed the whole thing had ended the week Margie did.