The Singer That Came Back Home

Jodi laughed. “Honey, if it matches, I don’t care who sewed it,” she said. “Half my moms would sew if they knew how. I’ll send you the pattern number and the fabric we ordered. Tell Kaylee I said she’s brave.”

The fabric came to thirty-one dollars at the fabric store in Alexandria. I paid it.

Kaylee tried to give me eleven dollars she had saved from babysitting, and I made her put it toward her dance shoes instead.

Then we started. That costume took nine Saturdays. Kaylee pinned and cut and sewed and ripped out and sewed again.

The skirt had a curved hem, which is hard for anybody, and the top had a zipper, which is harder.

She cried once, over that zipper. It was the sixth Saturday, the first week of March, and the wind was blowing snow sideways past the window.

She had put it in crooked twice, and the third time she put her head down on the table next to the Singer.

“I can’t do it,” she said into her arm. “I’m going to look stupid on stage. Everybody’s going to know mine is homemade.”

I sat down next to her and didn’t say anything for a while.

Then I opened the attachment box and took out the seam ripper with the cracked handle and set it next to her hand.

“Great-Grandma Edna ripped out more seams than she ever sewed,” I said. “She told me that. She said a good seamstress is just somebody who isn’t afraid of the seam ripper.”

Kaylee lifted her head. Her eyes were red. She had the thimble on, even though you don’t use a thimble on a zipper.

She looked at the seam ripper, and then she picked it up.

“Fourth time,” she said.

The fourth time, the zipper went in straight. She ran it up and down about twenty times, just to hear it.

Then she put on the top over her sweatshirt and spun around in the middle of my sewing room, arms out.

The last Saturday in March, the costume was done. Kaylee had hemmed the skirt by hand that morning, slip stitch, the way I showed her, with the thimble pushing every needle through.

We hung it on a padded hanger on the back of the door, and she stood looking at it with her hands on her hips like an old woman admiring her garden.

At noon, there was a knock on the front door instead of two honks from the street. I knew who it was before I opened it, because Megan never knocks.

Connie stood on my step in that same purple fleece.

She had her car keys in her hand and her purse over her arm, and her face was set the way it gets before a hard conversation.

“Megan got called in,” she said. “I came to get Kaylee.”

“Come in,” I said. “There’s coffee.”

“I’m fine on the step,” she said. Then, “No, I’ll come in. It’s cold.” She stepped inside onto my rug and stood there, not taking off her coat, looking at the house like she hadn’t been inside it in years. She hadn’t.

Kaylee came out of the back room carrying the costume on its hanger. She held it out in front of her with both hands, careful, like it was a cake.

“Grandma,” she said. “I made this. All of it. On Great-Grandma Edna’s machine.”

Connie looked at the costume a long time. She reached out and touched the hem.