The Sewing Room Sign on Our Door

The Month After

I would like to tell you that everything was fixed that Sunday. It wasn’t. Things like that take longer than one dinner.

Judy was polite to me for a while after that, but careful, the way people are careful after a funeral.

She called Kyle every night as usual, and when I answered she said, “Hi, honey, is Kyle there?” and nothing else.

She didn’t bring a casserole for three weeks. I know that sounds like nothing. In our family it was like a weather report.

Kyle and Walt put up the second handrail on her stairs that Saturday, like they said. Walt brought the stud finder. Kyle wired the motion light at the landing.

Amy told me later that Judy stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched them work all morning and didn’t say one word.

Then, when they were packing up, she went up and down those fourteen steps three times holding both rails, and at the bottom she said, “Well, that’s a good deal better,” and went to make them sandwiches.

In the middle of October, Amy called me at the salon. “Mom’s not sleeping,” she said. “I drove by at one last night and the upstairs lamp was on again. I think she’s embarrassed, Brooke. I think she doesn’t know how to come back.”

Tuesday is my day off. The salon closes Sundays and Mondays, and I take Tuesdays because Saturdays are my big day. That next Tuesday I drove out to the farm by myself.

She was in the kitchen, standing at the sink, and she startled when she saw my car in the lane. She came to the door wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was wearing the lavender cardigan again.

“Kyle all right?” she asked right away.

“Kyle’s fine,” I said. “I came to see you.”

She let me in and poured me coffee without asking, because she knows how I take it.

We sat at the kitchen table, not the dining room. The radio was on low, the farm report, corn prices out of Omaha.

“I need help with something,” I said. “My grandmother’s machine is in the room now. Kyle set it up the night of dinner. But I haven’t used a treadle in fifteen years, not really, and the tension’s off, and I can’t remember half of what she showed me.”

Judy looked at me over her cup.

“Kyle said you learned on a treadle,” I said.

“My mother’s,” she said slowly. “A White. I sewed on it until I was married. Dale bought me an electric one for our first anniversary and I cried, because I didn’t want it. I wanted the treadle. I still don’t like the electric ones. They go too fast.”

“Then I need you,” I said. “Tuesdays. That’s my day off. Come in and sew with me. Bring whatever you’re working on. I’ll make lunch. I’m not a good cook, but I can make a sandwich.”

She set her cup down. Her eyes filled up, but she didn’t let them spill.

“You want me in that room,” she said.

“I want you in that room on Tuesdays,” I said. “Because I asked you. Not because of anything.”

She was quiet for a long time. The farm report ended and a song came on, something old with a fiddle in it.

“What time?” she said.

“Nine. Is nine too early?”

“Nine is half the day gone, honey,” Judy said, and she almost smiled. “I’ll be there at eight-thirty.”