The second was a blanket for my daughter, stitched from her great-great-grandmother’s fabric scraps and my retired scrub tops.
By summer, Tara and Owen came out on Saturdays.
I taught her how to thread a bobbin and sew a straight seam.
“I thought I needed those clothes,” Tara said, concentrating on the needle.
“Nick told me I needed them more.”
“I did need something,” she said.
“It just wasn’t clothes.”
I smiled.
“Keep your fingers back from the foot,” I told her.
Priya came for dinner on Sundays and ended up as Nora’s godmother.
I still have the sage-green dress.
It hangs in a garment bag in the sewing room, beside a framed photograph from the lake.
In the picture, I am laughing, with the wind in my hair and a baby I haven’t met yet under my hand.
On the back of the frame, in red ink, Elaine wrote four words.
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