The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward
The woman in the red cardigan looked around at the others, and then she looked back at me, and she said, since November. Since right after we heard the news about her.
I did not understand what that meant yet. I filed it away in the back of my head.
Then the younger woman, the one who had pulled my chair in, asked me a question I did not see coming from a mile off.
She asked if I wanted to learn to wind the yarn.
She said every circle needs a winder, somebody to turn the loose skeins into balls so the knitters never have to stop and do it themselves, and the winder does not need to know the first thing about knitting.
She said it kind, but she said it plain, like a real job offer, like there was an actual spot that needed filling and I might just be the man for it.
I said I had hands like truck gears and I had never in my life made anything softer than a straight fence line.
She laughed at that and she looped a loose skein over my two hands, spread out wide, and she showed me how to let it feed off slow while she wound the ball.
And that is how I spent my first Thursday in that room. Sitting in a circle of women, with blue yarn running back and forth across my open hands, not making a single thing myself, and being more use to the world than I had been since October.
The Woman Who Knew My Name
I kept going back. I want that understood before I tell you the next part. I did not go the one time out of grief and then quit. I went every Thursday, snow or shine.
By February I could wind a skein into a ball that did not look like a bird had built it.
By March the woman in the red cardigan had me holding needles, badly, slow, making a lopsided cap that Carol said we could give to somebody with a good sense of humor.
And over those weeks I got the woman in the red cardigan’s story, in pieces, the way you get stories in a room where the hands are busy and nobody has to look straight at you while they talk.
Her name is Donna Reinhart. I had driven past her family’s place on the Ridge Road on the way to that hospital my whole life and never once put the two things together.
Nineteen years ago, Donna told me, she sat in one of those very recliners on the infusion floor, forty one years old, scared half out of her mind, with two kids at home and no hair left under a thin hospital scarf.