The Singer That Came Back Home

She turned the skirt over and looked at the inside, at the seams, the way any woman of her generation looks at the inside of something before she believes it.

“You did this?” she said.

“Every stitch,” Kaylee said. “Aunt Abby didn’t touch it. She just yelled at me about the zipper.”

“I did not yell,” I said.

“You said ‘oh, honey’ in a yelling way,” Kaylee said, and Connie laughed out loud, and then she put her hand over her mouth, and then she was crying.

She didn’t say anything for a while. She stood in my living room in her purple fleece and cried quietly into her hand.

Kaylee looked at me, alarmed, and I shook my head a little and took the hanger from her.

“Go get your boots on, sweetheart,” I said. Kaylee went.

Connie wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “I sold it for a hundred and fifty dollars,” she said. “I told myself it was the smart thing. And you went and bought it back and turned it into the one thing I couldn’t buy her.”

“You were trying to take care of her,” I said. “So was I. We just went at it from different ends.”

“Don’t be nice to me right now,” Connie said. “I can’t take it.” But she let me hug her, and she held on longer than I expected.

The third Saturday in May, the auditorium at the high school in Alexandria was full of grandparents and little brothers and dads holding bouquets from the grocery store.

Nate came, straight from planting, with dirt still under his nails no matter how hard he’d scrubbed.

He sat next to me with the program folded in his big hand.

Connie sat on my other side. Megan sat next to her. Nobody had planned that, it just happened, the way families end up in a row together when they’ve been working things out.

Kaylee’s class was ninth on the program. The lights came up blue, and eleven girls came out in blue skirts and fitted tops, and you could not have picked out which costume was homemade if you’d had a magnifying glass.

I knew which one it was, though. I knew where the zipper went in on the fourth try.

I knew the hem was hand-stitched with a dead woman’s thimble. I watched that skirt turn and lift and fall every time Kaylee spun.

Halfway through, Connie reached over and took my hand on the armrest and held it until the number was over.

She didn’t look at me. Neither of us could have looked at each other right then.

Afterward, in the lobby, it was a crush of flowers and hugs.

Kaylee came pushing through the crowd still in costume, with her hair in a bun and glitter on her cheeks. She ran straight to Connie.

A woman Connie knew from the clinic was standing there with her own granddaughter. She looked at Kaylee and said, “Look at you, that costume was beautiful. Did your grandma sew it?”

Kaylee shook her head. She held up her right hand, and on her middle finger, over the glitter, was Grandma Edna’s brass thimble.

She had worn it through the whole recital, tucked under her finger where nobody could see.

“I made it,” she said. “Aunt Abby taught me. On my great-grandma’s Singer. Every Saturday since October.”

The woman from the clinic said, “Well, my goodness,” and looked at Connie, and Connie looked at me, and her chin did that thing it does.