I showed her the basket, and the ledger, and the pages of no, and I watched my daughter meet her mother all over again through them, the way I had, and cry, and laugh at no, growing boy, and understand for the first time, as I had, that the woman who raised her had been quietly enormous in ways neither of us had bothered to see.

I put her to work.

I sat her at the second machine and gave her Franny’s diagrams, and it turned out Robin’s hands, like mine, remembered something her head had forgotten — Franny had taught her as a girl, on that very machine, and thirty years fell away and there was my daughter setting a sleeve while she talked, and talking while she set a sleeve, because it is easier to say true things to someone when your hands are busy and you don’t have to look straight at them.

We talked more that afternoon than we had in a decade.