Dorothy's Thimble

Dorothy had a thimble that was not hers. It was a small brass thing, dented on one side, and she had carried it in her sewing kit for forty-one years without once admitting where it came from. The truth was that it had belonged to her sister Pauline, and that Dorothy had taken it from the dresser the afternoon of the funeral, in the slow shameless way grief lets you take things, and that she had been sewing with a dead woman's thimble ever since. She thought about Pauline more on Tuesdays than any other day. She did not know why. Perhaps because the quilt circle was the one place that asked nothing of her except her hands, and a mind with idle hands wanders home. This Tuesday she sat in the rocker with the wedding-ring quilt across her knees and the brass thimble on her finger, and she watched June fuss with the kettle, and she thought: Pauline would have liked June. Pauline liked anyone who couldn't sit still. "You're far away," Margaret said. She had a gift for noticing. "I'm seventy-nine," Dorothy said. "Far away is most of where I live now." Margaret smiled and let it go, which was another of her gifts. The thing Dorothy could not say, the thing that sat in her chest like a swallowed button, was that Connie's empty chair had cracked something open. For eleven days she had been unable to stop thinking about every chair that had ever emptied. Pauline's. Her husband's. The small white chair, smaller than the others, that she did not let herself think about even now, even at seventy-nine, even with her hands full of somebody's wedding quilt. She pressed the dented thimble against the needle and pushed it through three layers of cloth. "Dorothy." Iris this time. "You've sewn your border to June's border." She had. The two long strips of cream fabric were joined where they should have been free, a seam running where no seam belonged, and the four of them looked at it, and then June laughed, a real laugh, the first real sound any of them had made in that room since the phone call about Connie. "Leave it," June said, wiping her eyes. "Leave it in. We'll know it's there. It can be the part that's ours." So Dorothy left it in. Her crooked accidental seam, sewn with a stolen thimble, joining two pieces of a quilt for a granddaughter none of them had met. It was, she thought, as honest a thing as she had made in years.