The button and the hems I could manage.

The wedding dress I could not, and it terrified me, and it was due in April, so in December I sat down in front of Franny’s good machine and taught myself to use it the way you learn anything at seventy — badly, slowly, swearing, and alone.

I found her manuals.

I found, tucked in a drawer, a notebook where she had written out her own methods in that square hand, little diagrams of how she set a sleeve and turned a cuff, and I realized she must have made it years ago for exactly no reason except that she loved the doing of it enough to want it written down.

I followed her diagrams like a man following a voice through fog.