And Robin brings Wren every second Saturday, and my granddaughter, who is in fact exactly like me, has decided the wall of thread belongs to her, and sits under the cutting table sorting spools by color for hours, and last Saturday she looked up at me from down there and said, “Grandpa, teach me a button,” and I got down on the floor with my bad knees, which Franny would have laughed at, and I taught her a button.

Robin watched from the second machine.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody had to; the thing we could never say to each other, my daughter and I, we say now with our hands, over cloth, on Thursdays, in the room her mother left us.

People who hear the story sometimes call it sad, the old man who lost his wife and took over her little shop.

I understand why, but they have it backward.