The Singer That Came Back Home

“Found me on the sign-in sheet,” he said.

“I did. I’m sorry if that’s strange.”

“No,” he said. “It’s smart. I’d have done the same.” He took his glasses off and folded them. “My wife, Arlys, had one just like this. A 201. She sewed every curtain in this house on it.”

“Where is it now?” I asked.

“Our daughter took it to Fargo after Arlys died. That was eight years ago.” He looked at the Singer. “I saw this one at the sale and I just wanted the sound of one in the house again. That’s the whole reason. It’s not a good reason to keep something that was promised to somebody.”

I put the four hundred dollars on the table, folded once, the way Nate said. Merle looked at it and shook his head right away.

“I only paid one-fifty,” he said. “You can have it for one-fifty. I’m not going to make money off a dead woman’s note.”

“You put a cord and a belt on it,” I said. “You put your Sunday into it. And I’d rather overpay than have you think for one minute that I came out here and talked you out of something.”

We went back and forth for a while, the polite Minnesota way, where both people are trying to lose. Finally he picked up the money and tapped it on the table to square it.

“My granddaughter Hailey’s been asking for a sewing machine for the county fair,” he said. “One of the new ones, with the fancy stitches. This’ll go a long way on that. So I’ll take it, but it isn’t mine. It’s hers.”

“That seems right,” I said.

He carried the Singer out to my car himself, with the little wooden attachment box Connie had thrown in with it, and set it on the back seat with an old blanket under it so it wouldn’t slide.

Then he stood in the yard with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“What are you going to do about your aunt?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I’m not going to throw it in her face.”

“Good,” he said. “Families are hard enough. A machine shouldn’t make it harder.” He slapped the roof of the car twice like I was a truck pulling out of the yard, and I drove home with Grandma’s Singer behind me.

I set the Singer on my sewing table in the back bedroom that night. I didn’t plug it in.

I just sat with it for a while, with the light off and the yard light coming in through the blinds.

Then I thought about Kaylee practicing her steps in the Cenex parking lot while her mom pumped gas.

I thought about what Connie had said, that an old machine in my spare room didn’t help anybody.

She was wrong about that, but she was not all the way wrong. A machine in a spare room is just furniture.

Grandma never sewed so she’d have something to look at. She sewed so people would have something to wear.

On Tuesday at noon, on my lunch in the car outside a client’s house, I called Connie. I knew she’d be at the clinic, on her break, eating a sandwich at her desk.

“I’ve got Grandma’s Singer back,” I said.

There was a long silence.

“How,” she said finally. It wasn’t really a question.

“I found the man who bought it. Merle Haugen, out by Herman. He sold it back to me. He was kind about it.”