Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
In the evenings he sat in his dad’s old recliner and watched the Wichita news with his mother. Neither of them talked about the money. They talked about the weather and the price of corn.
I cooked every supper. I did every load of laundry we made.
I simply wanted there to be nothing she could point to and say, see, they’re wrecking my house. I wanted the only thing in that house out of place to be us.
On the third night I came out of the bathroom and found Linda in the hallway outside the sewing room door, just standing there in the dark listening to the kids breathe. She jumped when she saw me.
“I was just checking on the furnace,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I said.
The furnace is in the garage. We both knew it. I went to bed.
On the fourth day I came home from work and Linda had moved her quilt top off the cutting table and put it away in the closet, folded in a pillowcase.
In its place on the table she had laid out a stack of coloring books and a coffee can of crayons.
“So nobody gets them in the fabric,” she said when she saw me looking. She said it a little stiffly, but she said it.
That was also the day Hailey lost a button off her winter coat.
The big brown toggle on the front had been hanging by a thread for a week and it finally gave up at recess. She came home holding it in her fist.
“I can sew it on tonight,” I said.
“Can I do it?” Hailey asked. “On Grandma’s machine?”
I opened my mouth to say no. That sewing machine is the most precious object in Linda’s house. Nobody touched it.
Nate wasn’t even allowed to touch it when he was a boy. But before I could say a word, Linda spoke up from the kitchen doorway.
“You can’t sew a toggle on a machine, honey,” she said. “But I have a spare coat button that would work. A flat one with four holes. That kind you can sew on a machine, if you’re careful.”
Hailey looked up at her like she’d hung the moon.
I watched from the hallway. I didn’t go in.
Linda sat at her machine and pulled a second chair right up beside her, and Hailey climbed up on it with her coat in her lap and her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth.
Linda took the regular foot off and screwed on a little button foot. She set the button on the coat, lined up the holes, and lowered the foot to hold it down.
Then she turned the stitch dial to zigzag and set the width so the needle would swing from one hole to the other.
“Now, before you ever press that pedal,” Linda said, “you turn the wheel by hand. Slow. Like this. You make sure the needle goes in the hole and not the button. If it hits the button it’ll break, and then we’ll both be crying.”
Hailey turned the wheel. Click. Into the hole. She turned it back. Click. Into the other hole. She looked up at her grandmother.
“Good,” Linda said softly. “Now. Easy on the pedal. Just a tap.”
The machine hummed. Eight stitches, ten. Linda counted them under her breath.
Then she showed Hailey how to raise the needle and pull the threads to the back and tie them off with her fingers, three knots, tight.