The Singer That Came Back Home

“How much did you pay him?”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s not why I called.”

“Abby, if you called to make me feel bad, you can save your breath. I already feel bad. I felt bad on Saturday night and I felt bad all through church.”

“I didn’t call to make you feel bad,” I said. “I called because I want Kaylee to come over on Saturdays. I’ll teach her to sew on it. For free. Every Saturday, as long as she wants to come.”

The silence went on so long that I checked to see if the call had dropped.

“Why would you do that?” Connie asked. Her voice had gone thin. “After I sold it out from under you.”

“Because that’s what the machine is for,” I said. “Grandma taught me on it when I was eight. Kaylee is family too. She’s Grandma’s great-granddaughter. She ought to have the chance.”

“She won’t sit still for it,” Connie said. “She’s eleven. All she wants is dance.”

“Dancers need costumes,” I said. “And costumes cost money. Tell her that.”

There was another quiet, and then Connie let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “You sound just like your grandmother.”

“I’ll ask Megan,” she said. “I’m not promising anything.”

“I’m not asking you to promise. Saturday at nine. I’ll have coffee on and cinnamon rolls from the bakery.”

Kaylee came that Saturday at nine on the dot. Megan dropped her off in the old Buick with the bad muffler, waved at me from the driveway, and pulled away fast because she had a shift at the motel.

Kaylee stood on my step in a hoodie from the dance studio with her hands jammed in the front pocket.

She had her mother’s dark eyes and Connie’s chin, and she looked at me like she had been sent to the principal.

“Grandma says you’re going to teach me to sew,” she said.

“If you want to learn,” I said. “If you hate it, you can quit and I won’t tell a soul. Come have a cinnamon roll first.”

She ate two. Then I took her back to the sewing room, and she stopped in the doorway when she saw the Singer sitting there under the lamp, black and gold and heavy as a church bell.

“That’s the one from the sale,” she said. “Grandma said it went to a farmer.”

“It came back,” I said. “Sit down. It won’t bite. It’s older than your grandma, and it’s still got more sense than most of us.”

She sat at it like it might bite anyway, with her hands in her lap. I showed her the spool pin and the thread guide and the take-up lever.

I showed her how to wind a bobbin, which made her laugh because the bobbin winder spins so fast.

Then I needed an empty bobbin for her to wind her own, and I opened the little wooden attachment box that had gone with the machine at the sale. I hadn’t looked inside it yet.

There were bobbins in there, and a seam ripper with a cracked handle, and a paper of pins.

And in the back corner, where it had rolled, was Grandma’s brass thimble, worn thin on one side from sixty years of pushing needles through denim.

I picked it up and held it. It was cold, and then it wasn’t. I hadn’t known it was in there.

Connie must not have known either, or it would have been in a box on a table for a dollar.