The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

Kim picked up a red pair of mittens by one cuff, the way you would pick up a dish towel somebody left on the counter, and turned it over twice.

“Oh, Sandra,” she said, and she smiled at me the way you smile at a child who brings you a drawing. “They’re just yarn.”

Then she took a black marker out of her apron pocket, wrote $2 on an index card in big round numbers, and tucked the card into the first bin.

I stood there with my hands still on the lid of the second bin. It was 8:15 on a Saturday morning in October, and the fellowship hall at St. John’s smelled like coffee and cinnamon and floor wax.

Kim lifted both bins, one at a time, and slid them under the front table. She tugged the long white tablecloth down over them so it hung neat to the floor.

Above them, on top of the table, stood her candles. Thirty-two jars of soy wax in three neat rows, each one with a little burlap tag tied on with jute twine. Forty dollars apiece.

“Front table’s for the showpieces,” she said, straightening a jar so the tag faced out. “People come for the candles. We have to put our best foot forward this year.”

I want to tell this honestly, so I will say it plainly. My face went hot, and for one second I thought of three or four things to say, and none of them were kind.

I had knit those mittens since January. Sixty pairs. Real wool, worsted weight, from a little mill up near the Canadian line that still spins it the old way.

Not the acrylic you buy in the big skeins at the discount store, that squeaks on the needles and pills after one week of recess.

Wool keeps a child’s hands warm even when it gets wet. That was the whole point.

Every pair had a double cuff, folded back, so the snow cannot get up the sleeve when a little one falls in the ditch.

Every pair had the thumb gusset my mother-in-law taught me thirty-five years ago at her kitchen table.

I figured about five hours a pair, maybe six for the bigger sizes. Most of it happened in Dave’s recliner after supper, with the ten o’clock news on and the woodstove ticking.

I had spent a little over three hundred dollars on wool. I never added it up until later, and I would not have told anybody if I had.

It was for the church. That was the deal I made with myself.

Kim’s candles were pretty. I will say that too. She had poured them in her garage all summer, and the whole hall smelled like apple and balsam because of her.

“Kim,” I said, and I stopped. I could hear how my voice was going to sound, so I did not finish.

“Hmm?” She was already looking past me at the door, where the Lindgren girls were coming in with a sheet cake.

Over her shoulder, Jan was standing at the coffee urn with a stack of styrofoam cups. Jan is Pastor Glen’s wife.

She had heard every word, and she was looking at me with her eyebrows up, waiting to see what I would do.

Behind Jan, the hall was filling. Young families with strollers. The Altar Guild ladies at the bake table. Old Mr.

Halvorson in his feed cap, already sitting down at a round table with his coffee, because he comes every year for the lefse and the company.