Always Pins First

The museum on the waterfront in Astoria wanted the ship back on Friday. On Wednesday my grandmother lifted the glass case off it and we saw the tear: the mainsail split from the top corner almost down to the middle.

She made those sails in 1979, out of one of her own pillowcases. She's told me that maybe forty times, and I've never once minded.

I reached for the needle first, because that's what you do when you're in a hurry.

“Pins,” she said. “Always pins first.”

So we laid the sail flat on the kitchen table and pinned the tear shut, edge to edge, one pin every half inch. The cloth was thin as tissue paper and yellow along the folds. Then she opened the old tin with the lighthouse on the lid and gave me a needle so small I had to hold it up to the lamp to find the eye.

“You thread it,” she said. “My hands are no good after four o'clock.”

They're no good before four o'clock either, and neither of us said so.

So I sewed and she talked. She told me about the ship again — the southern route, Cape Town to Melbourne, wool in the hold, ninety days at sea, her father twice. My stitches were too big at the start. She didn't touch my hands. She just said, “Smaller,” until they were smaller.

Two of the little nails that hold the boom had worked loose as well. She gave me the small hammer and I raised it.

“Tap it,” she said. “Don't push it. A pushed nail comes out in a year. A tapped nail is solid.”

On Friday morning we carried the ship down and set it back in its case by the southern windows, where the light comes in all afternoon. She put one finger on the mended sail, carefully, the way you'd touch a dog that isn't yours.

From where the visitors stand, a meter back behind the rope, you can't tell which stitches are hers and which ones are mine.

“Solid,” she said.