The Singer That Came Back Home

“What’s that?” Kaylee asked.

“That’s Great-Grandma Edna’s thimble,” I said. “She wore it every time she hand-stitched anything. She had it on when she taught me.”

I didn’t plan what I did next. I took Kaylee’s hand and put the thimble on her middle finger. It was too big. It slid right down past the first knuckle and wobbled there.

“It’s too big,” she said.

“You’ll grow into it,” I said. “It’s yours now. Grandma would want it on somebody’s hand, not in a drawer.”

Kaylee looked at the thimble for a long time. Then she curled her fingers around it so it wouldn’t fall off, and she said, very quietly, “Okay.” She wore it the whole morning, even when she didn’t need it.

We started with pillowcases, because everybody starts with pillowcases. You can’t ruin a pillowcase, and at the end you have something real to take home.

Kaylee picked fabric with cartoon cats on it and sewed every seam twice to be sure.

She took it home to Megan, and Megan sent me a text that night with a picture of Kaylee asleep on it. The text just said, She won’t let me wash it.

The next Saturday we made a drawstring bag for her dance shoes.

The Saturday after that, she wanted to make one for her mom, for work, to carry her lunch. She picked out fabric with little coffee cups on it.

By Thanksgiving she could thread the machine without me, wind a bobbin, and sew a straight seam at a decent speed.

I told her what Grandma told me: don’t push it, guide it, the machine knows where it’s going.

Connie never came in. For the first six Saturdays, she never came to my house at all. It was always Megan who dropped off and Megan who picked up, honking twice from the street.

I didn’t push. I figured Connie would come when she came. Grandma used to say you can’t hurry a person into being sorry, any more than you can hurry bread.

At Christmas, Kaylee made her grandma a set of pot holders, with a layer of old towel inside for padding, quilted in straight lines.

“Do you think she’ll like them?” she asked.

“I think she’ll keep them forever and never once use them on a hot pan,” I said. “That’s what grandmas do with the good ones.”

In January, Kaylee came in with a sheet of paper folded in her pocket. It was the recital letter from the studio in Alexandria.

She set it on the sewing table in front of me and smoothed it flat.

The spring recital was the third Saturday in May, at the high school auditorium. Each class had a costume.

Hers was a lyrical number, and the costume was a blue skirt and a fitted top, and the fee was eighty-five dollars, due by February first.

“Mom says we can’t do it,” Kaylee said. She said it flat, like she was reading a weather report. “Grandma says she’ll figure it out. But Grandma always says that and then she looks tired.”

I read the letter twice. Then I called the studio on Monday and asked for the owner, a woman named Jodi who has run that studio for twenty years and knows every mother in four counties.

I explained who I was and who Kaylee was. I asked her, very carefully, if a girl could sew her own costume if it matched the other girls exactly, same fabric, same pattern, same color.