I have a daughter, Priscilla, 9, from my first marriage. Her father died when she was two, so for years it was the two of us — until I married Warren.
Warren treats her like his own. His mother, Eileen, does the reverse.
Eileen says things like, “It’s cute you play house with somebody else’s kid.”
Priscilla is the softest kid alive. In April she decided to crochet 63 lap blankets for a nursing home in Belvidere.
She bought yarn with her birthday money, learned the stitches off her tablet, and worked at it for five months.
Sixty-three. I counted them twice.
Last Sunday we loaded EVERY one of them into the trunk of my car. The delivery was Tuesday.
Monday, Warren left for a job in Rockford.
Whenever he’s gone, Eileen “stops by.”
We came home from the store and Priscilla went straight out to the garage to count them one more time.
Then a scream.
“Mom… MOM!”
The trunk was open. The trunk was EMPTY.
She was sitting on the concrete when I turned and saw Eileen in the doorway with my spare key in her hand.
“I got rid of them,” she said. “Five months on strangers. It’s ridiculous.”
“You took sixty-three blankets out of my car?” I said. My hands were shaking.
Eileen shrugged. “They were UGLY. And she needs a REAL hobby.”
Priscilla said, “They weren’t ugly…” and then she couldn’t talk anymore.
Eileen walked out.
She left the trunk open.
That night Priscilla fell asleep in her coat, on top of the covers, still cold from the garage.
I sat in the kitchen holding the lid of an empty yarn bin and didn’t move for an hour.
Eileen thought that was the END of it.
What she didn’t count on was Warren.
He got home Wednesday afternoon. I told him all of it, standing in the kitchen, and his face went very still.
He didn’t yell. He didn’t ask a single question.
He walked out to the driveway, called her, and said in a voice I have never heard him use:
“Ma. I’m home. Come over. I have a SURPRISE for you.” ⬇️
The driveway
He came back in and put his phone face down on the counter. He was still in his work coat.
“She’ll be twenty minutes,” he said. “She’s coming from her sister’s.”
I asked him what the surprise was.
“There isn’t one.” He opened the fridge, looked at nothing, closed it. “She has to be in a room where I can see her face.”
I hadn’t slept. I’d spent Tuesday morning calling the nursing home in Belvidere to tell a woman named Sandra that we weren’t coming, and Sandra was kind about it, which made it worse. Then I’d driven to two donation bins on Logan and one behind the church on State, and I’d stood there with my hands in the slot of the second one like a person trying to feel the bottom of a well.
Warren said, “Where’s Priscilla.”
“Her room. She hasn’t come down.”
He went up. I heard the two low sounds of him talking and her not answering.
When he came back down he said, “She thinks she has to make them again.”
“She can’t. There isn’t time and there isn’t yarn.”
“I know that.” He picked his phone back up and set it down again in the same spot. “Does she?”
Headlights swung across the kitchen window.
Twenty minutes
Eileen came in through the garage, which is the part I keep thinking about. Through the garage, past the car, like nothing had ever happened in there.
She had a bakery box. She set it on the counter and took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair the way she does, and she said, “Well? What’s my surprise?”
Warren said, “Sit down, Ma.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Sit down.”
She sat. She looked at me while she did it, and there was a small thing in her face I didn’t have a name for yet. Not guilt. Closer to somebody checking a scoreboard.
Warren said, “Where are they.”
“Where are what.”
“The blankets.”
“I told Denise. I got rid of them.”
“Got rid of them where.”
Eileen opened the bakery box and started peeling the tape off the second flap, which did not need peeling. “Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“They’re gone. That’s the answer.” She got the flap open. “You want to know what I actually think? I think that child needs a friend, not a hobby that keeps her sitting in a room for five months. Somebody had to do something.”
“You opened her mother’s car.”
“I have a key to that car.” She said it plainly. Not defensive. Like she was correcting the year on a form. “I’ve had it for two years. Denise gave it to me herself, the winter she was in the hospital with her back.”
That was true. That’s the thing. I gave it to her. She fed our cat that week and moved my car for the plows and I never asked for it back, and for two years it had been sitting in her purse being nothing at all.
Warren looked at me. I nodded, once.
He said, “Give it here.”
She took it out of her coat pocket, not her purse, and put it on the counter between the bakery box and the sink, and she pushed it toward him with one finger.
She said, “You’ll thank me in a year.”
The bin lid
After she left I went out to the garage and turned the light on.
Sixty-three lap blankets do not just fit in a trunk. We had to put the back seats down and the last eleven went in through the cabin, and Priscilla had made a system, mint and dusty rose alternating so the home could hand them out without two of the same color going to the same table, and she’d been very serious about that, and I had said sure, honey, that’s smart, and I hadn’t really been listening.
The trunk was still open. I hadn’t closed it since Monday. I don’t know why.
I closed it.
Then I picked up the yarn bin lid off the floor where I’d left it and I turned it over, and there was a strip of masking tape on the inside with Priscilla’s handwriting on it. START AGAIN AT 40. She’d counted wrong once in June and had to rip back most of an afternoon’s work, and she’d taped herself a note so she wouldn’t do it twice.
Nine years old, taping instructions to herself.
I sat down on the step going up to the kitchen and stayed there a while.
That’s where I was when I heard her come out, in her socks, on the concrete.
She said, “Grandma Eileen’s car was here.”
“She came by. She’s gone.”
Priscilla stood in the doorway with her arms crossed over her stomach the way she does when she’s cold or when she isn’t.
She said, “Did she say where they went?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said, and I could hear her deciding something. “Then I’m going to go look.”
Wednesday night, the phone
I told her no. It was almost nine and it was forty degrees and there was nothing to look for.
She said, “The one behind the church has a window in the front. You can see in it.”
I said how do you know that, and she said because we drove past it every Sunday for four years and she looked in it every time, because that’s the kind of thing she does, and I stood in my own garage getting told about my own town by a fourth grader.
Warren said, from the kitchen, “I’ll take her.”
They went. I stayed, because somebody had to be here if Eileen came back, which she did not.
They were gone an hour and ten minutes. When they came in Priscilla went straight upstairs and Warren stood in the doorway with his coat still zipped and said, “Two bins on Logan are picked up Tuesdays. Truck came Tuesday morning.”
“And the church?”
“Church one’s a shed, not a bin. Locked. There’s a number on it.”
“Warren.”
“I called it from the parking lot. Guy named Ron. He said nothing came in this week except a stroller.” He unzipped his coat finally. “She didn’t put them in a bin, Denise.”
I said what do you mean.
“Ron’s shed is the only one that isn’t a bin, and she’d have had to arrange it. Bins on Logan, she’d have had to make three trips at eight o’clock at night with her hip.” He hung his coat on the same chair his mother had used. “She didn’t make three trips.”
“Then where are they?”
He said, “That’s what I’ve been thinking about since Tuesday.”
Sandra
Thursday morning I called Belvidere again to apologize a second time, which nobody needs, but I wanted Sandra to hear it from a person and not from a voicemail.
Sandra said, “Oh — I meant to call you. Are we still doing the fifteenth?”
I said the fifteenth of what.
“The second half,” she said. “Your mother-in-law said the second half would come the fifteenth. She was very specific.”
I sat down on the arm of the couch.
I said, Sandra, say that again slowly.
Sandra said a woman had come Tuesday morning, right about when we’d have come, and she’d brought them in on a folding cart, four loads, and she’d asked the front desk if they wanted them in the activity room or the wing, and she’d said the girl who made them was shy and wasn’t coming in, and could they please not make a thing of it. And she’d left her first name and no last name and no number, and she’d said the rest would come the fifteenth.
I said how many.
Sandra said, “Thirty-one. I counted them for the log.”
Thirty-one. Out of sixty-three.
I said, Sandra, did she say anything else at all.
And Sandra, who did not know one single thing about any of this, said, “She said she made half of them herself.”
The activity room
We drove out there Friday, all three of us, and I did not tell Priscilla why.
They were on the backs of chairs in the activity room. Mint, dusty rose, mint, dusty rose, exactly the way she’d wanted, because Eileen had carried them in in the order they came out of my trunk and hadn’t understood the system well enough to break it.
Priscilla stopped in the doorway and did not go in for a long time.
There was a woman by the window with one over her knees, cream one, the big one Priscilla finished in August and complained about for a week.
Priscilla said, quietly, “That’s the one that’s crooked on the bottom.”
Sandra came over and said, are you the girl, and Priscilla said yes, and Sandra said, well, your grandmother is a piece of work, and Priscilla said, “What?”
I had to say it in the hallway. I’d meant to do it in the car later, in the dark, where a person can look out a window.
I said Grandma Eileen took them here.
Priscilla said, “Then why did she say she got rid of them?”
I did not have an answer. I still don’t have a good one.
Then Warren said, “Because if she’d told you, you’d have thanked her, and then you’d have kept going. Thirty-two more. Then another sixty-three.”
Priscilla looked at him.
He said, “She wanted you to stop. She didn’t want them thrown away. She wanted you to stop, and she wanted it to hurt enough to work.”
Priscilla thought about that with her whole face.
She said, “Where’s the other thirty-two?”
What was in the spare room
Eileen lives in a ranch on Pearl with a spare room she calls the sewing room, and Warren has a key to that house the same way she had one to my car, and I want it on the record that I did not tell him to use it.
He went Saturday morning. He told me after.
They were in the spare room, in two contractor bags, and they were not in bags because they were being thrown away, because you do not fold thirty-two lap blankets into thirds before you throw them away.
And there were four more that weren’t Priscilla’s.
Same yarn — she’d bought yarn. Same stitch, wrong tension, the way it goes when somebody’s hands are seventy and out of practice. One of them barely a foot long and abandoned mid-row with the hook still in it.
Warren put the hook on the kitchen counter Saturday when he got home. Just set it down, same spot he’d set his phone.
He said, “She was going to finish them and take them the fifteenth and never say a word about any of it.”
I said, “She made a nine-year-old cry on a concrete floor.”
“Yes.”
“Warren.”
“I know what she did.” He sat down. He put both hands flat on the table. “I’m telling you what she was doing. They’re not the same thing and I’m not asking you to make them the same thing.”
I asked him what he wanted to do.
He said, “I want Priscilla to have them back and I want it to be Priscilla who decides what happens after that.” He looked at the hook on the counter. “And I want my mother to have to stand there while she does.”
The fifteenth
We did it at the home, because Priscilla wanted it there and not in anybody’s kitchen.
Eileen came because Warren told her the time and the place and nothing else, and she came in through the front doors with her coat over her arm and stopped when she saw the cart with thirty-two blankets on it and her son and her granddaughter standing behind it.
Priscilla had rehearsed. I know she had, because I heard her in her room.
She said, “You took my stuff and you lied to me.”
Eileen said, “I did.”
“You could have just asked me to stop.”
“I asked your mother twice.”
“You didn’t ask ME.” Priscilla’s voice went up and cracked and she kept going anyway. “I would have said no. But you didn’t ask me.”
Eileen stood there with her coat over her arm. She said, “No. I didn’t.”
Then Priscilla took the four unfinished ones off the bottom of the cart, the ones with the wrong tension, and held them out.
She said, “You have to bring these yourself. And you have to say they’re yours.”
Eileen did not take them.
Sandra was at the desk pretending to be at the desk. Two residents by the window pretending to be by the window.
Eileen said, “They’re not good.”
Priscilla said, “Neither was my first one.”
I watched a seventy-one-year-old woman stand in a nursing home lobby holding her coat and not be able to make her arms work. It took a while. She got them up eventually and Priscilla put the four in them and Eileen carried them into the activity room herself and told the woman by the window that she’d made them and that they weren’t very good, and the woman said they were warm, which is the only thing anybody in that room actually cared about.
Warren didn’t say a word the whole time.
In the car he handed Priscilla the crochet hook. His mother’s.
Priscilla said, “She’ll want it back.”
He said, “Then she knows where you live.”
The step
It’s November now. Eileen doesn’t have a key to my car and she’s not going to, and that’s not a punishment, it’s just where the line is, and she has never once asked for it back.
She comes on Sundays. She sits at the end of the couch. Sometimes they work and don’t talk, which suits them both better than talking.
Priscilla’s on number nineteen of the next batch. She says forty this time, not sixty-three, because sixty-three was too many and she knew it in July and didn’t want to say so.
Last week I found the bin lid again, out in the garage on the shelf where the tape stuff goes. START AGAIN AT 40, still on the inside.
I brought it in and set it on the table and asked her if she wanted it.
She looked at it for a second and said, “That’s not for this one. That was for June.”
Then she took it anyway and went back to the couch, and the two of them sat there under the lamp, and Eileen said her tension was too tight again, and Priscilla said, “So is yours.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has a kid in the house who makes things nobody asked them to make.
For more tales of unexpected twists and turns in life, check out My Husband Says I Died Four Months After They Put Me Out or perhaps I Was Twelve Hours Into A Shift When His Boots Came Through My Doors. You might also find yourself engrossed in My Grandmother’s House Was the First Line on the Page I Signed.
