The Mittens Under the Bazaar Table

I did not enjoy that. I want to be honest about it. Some small, mean part of me thought, well, now she knows what it feels like to be put under the table.

But most of me just felt sick. She is my husband’s brother’s wife. She has been at every Christmas for twenty-six years. She brought a hotdish to my mother’s funeral, the good one with the wild rice.

That afternoon, I called Marlys back and asked her, please, to tell the prayer chain that the mittens were my idea from start to finish, and that Kim had worked harder on that bazaar than anybody in ten years, and that the roof fund came in at the best total since the church paid off the parking lot.

All of which was true.

“That’s decent of you, Sandra,” Marlys said.

“It’s not decent,” I said. “It’s just true.”

Kim came to my kitchen on Thursday evening.

It was after supper, already dark, sleet ticking on the window over the sink. I heard the Buick in the yard and the dog barked once and stopped.

Dave looked up from his seed catalog, looked at me, and quietly took his coffee down to the basement, where he keeps his workbench.

She knocked on the back door, which she has never done. Family does not knock at our house.

I opened it and she stood on the step in her camel coat with a plastic grocery bag in one hand.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“Of course you can.”

She sat down at my kitchen table, in the chair by the window, and set the grocery bag in front of her.

I put the kettle on, because that is what you do, and got down two mugs. Neither of us said anything while the water heated.

When I set the tea in front of her she wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at it.

“The roof bid came in at forty-one thousand,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“I heard it was a lot.”

“Forty-one thousand. The council has nineteen saved. Pastor Glen asked me in June if I would run the bazaar, because Lois’s hip is bad, and then at the same meeting the treasurer said if the bazaar did not bring in at least eight thousand this year we’d have to take out a loan.” She shook her head.

“Eight thousand. The bazaar has never done more than six.”

I sat down across from her.

“I have not slept right since June, Sandra. I made lists. I went to three other church bazaars in August with a notebook, and I wrote down what sold. Candles sold. Fancy jars sold. The bake table sold. Practical things, the things people make every year, they sat there.” She turned the mug around.

“So I put the things that sold in front. And I priced everything else to move.”

“Mittens don’t move in October,” I said. “Nobody thinks about mittens till the first cold.”

“I know that now.”

She was quiet a while. The sleet kept ticking.

“That’s not all of it,” she said. “If I’m going to say it, I’m going to say all of it.”

I waited.

“When Tom and I got married, your mother-in-law was already teaching you to knit. Do you remember that? You two at her table every Wednesday night, with the coffee and the radio on.” Kim’s voice went tight.