The Singer That Came Back Home

“She did,” Connie said to the woman, loud enough for half the lobby to hear. “Every stitch. Her aunt Abby taught her. I had nothing to do with it except drive.”

That was the most I ever heard my aunt Connie say about herself in public. In our family, that counts as a speech.

We went to the Dairy Queen afterward, all of us, Kaylee still in her costume with a jacket over it.

Nate bought everybody Blizzards. Megan laughed more that night than I had heard her laugh in years.

In the parking lot, while Nate was helping Megan look at the muffler on the Buick, Connie came and stood next to me by the car.

The sun was going down orange over the lake, and the air smelled like cut grass and fryer oil.

“Abby,” she said. “I’ve got a dress for next year’s recital. My good navy one. It’s too long, and I’ve been meaning to have it taken up for three years.”

She didn’t look at me while she said it. She looked out at the lake.

“Would you hem it for me?” she asked. “On Mom’s machine. I’ll pay you.”

“You won’t pay me,” I said. “Bring it over on a Saturday. Kaylee can help.”

Connie nodded. Then she reached into her purse and took out a flat tin box, an old cookie tin with roses on the lid, and handed it to me. I knew what it was before I opened it.

It was Grandma’s pattern tin. Every pattern she had ever saved, some of them from the forties, folded and refolded until the tissue was soft as skin.

Connie had pulled it out of the sale the night before. She had never told anyone.

“I couldn’t sell that one,” she said. “I don’t know why. I think I knew even then.”

I held the tin against my chest in the Dairy Queen parking lot and didn’t say anything for a long time.

Connie patted my arm twice, like Merle had patted my car, and went to collect her granddaughter.

The Singer is still on my sewing table in the back bedroom. Kaylee still comes on Saturdays, most of them, though now she has a phone and a best friend and opinions about music.

This fall she wants to make costumes for two of the younger girls at the studio whose mothers can’t afford the fee.

Jodi already said yes. Kaylee says she’s going to charge them nothing, because that’s what Aunt Abby charges.

Connie’s navy dress hangs in my closet, pinned and ready. She comes in now when she picks Kaylee up.

She has coffee. Sometimes she sits on the bed in the sewing room and tells us we’re going too fast.

Merle Haugen sent me a Christmas card that first winter. Inside was a photo of his granddaughter Hailey at the county fair with a purple ribbon and a quilted table runner.

On the back he had written, Arlys would have liked this.

The thimble still doesn’t fit Kaylee. She keeps it in the Singer’s attachment box when she isn’t wearing it, in the back corner, right where Grandma left it.

Grandma’s note card is tucked in the frame of my mirror. The front says the Singer goes to Abby, she’s the one who sews. The back says Merle Haugen, Herman, in my own handwriting.

I think about that card sometimes. A note isn’t a will, Connie said, and she was right. A note is smaller than a will.

It just tells you what somebody hoped for, and then it’s up to you whether you make it true.