…saying in a bright, bubbly voice, “And this is my sweet grandma, who just loves helping with my little business! Say hi, Grandma!” My grandmother, eighty two years old, did not look up. Her glasses were pushed up onto her forehead and her face was an inch from the needle, and her fingers, wrapped in white tape, were guiding a hem through a machine that rattled like a freight train. Piles of pale blue dresses lay across the bed, with paper tags that read, Brittany Belle, Handmade With Love. I crossed the room, took the phone out of the hand of my cousin, and pressed the red button until the little light went out.
“Amber, what is wrong with you,” Brittany said. “I was in the middle of a live!” I did not answer. I knelt beside my grandmother and put one hand over hers, and the machine stopped. She blinked at me, slowly, as if I had woken her out of a dream. “Amber, baby, is it Friday already?” she asked. “Grandma, it is Thursday,” I said. “How long have you been sewing?” She looked at the clock. “Since six this morning, I believe,” she said. “I have one more box to do. Brittany has orders to ship by Saturday. She is selling them for eighty five dollars apiece, you know.”
I looked around the room. Sixty boxes stood stacked against the wall, each one labeled in pink marker with a name and a city. A ring light on a tripod was aimed at the machine, and a backdrop of white curtains hung behind it. This was not a bedroom. It was a studio. “Brittany, how many dresses are in these boxes?” I asked. “Three hundred and twelve,” she said, lifting her chin. “It is my best month ever. Do you know how many followers I have?” I pointed at my grandmother. “Do you know how many hours she has hemmed, Brittany? Because I counted nine fingers with tape on them.”
A spool of pale blue thread left on a sewing table gave one granddaughter the weekend to bring her grandmother back to the rocking chair in Birmingham.
I gave my terms standing between my cousin and the sewing machine. My grandmother was going home with me that afternoon, and she would not touch a needle for Brittany Belle again, unless it was for an honest wage. For the weeks she had worked, Brittany would pay her twelve dollars a dress, which came to eleven thousand, three hundred dollars, in a check made out in her own name. Brittany would also post a public correction on every account she owned, saying who had really made those hems. And she would pay for a proper eye exam and a new pair of glasses.
Brittany went white and then red. “You cannot make me post that,” she snapped. “Everyone will think I am a fraud.” My grandmother, in her small, gentle voice, set the thread down on the table. “Brittany, honey, I do not mind helping you,” she said. “I never minded. I minded that I could not read the hymnal on Sunday anymore, and you never noticed. I minded that when I asked for a cup of tea, you told me to hurry.” She folded her hands. “I am old, but I am not stupid. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to be near you. That was my mistake.”
The room went quiet. Brittany looked at her own hands, which were small and smooth and perfectly manicured, and for the first time I saw her face lose its practiced shine. “Grandma, I did not think,” she said, her voice thin. “I thought you were happy. You always said you were happy.” My grandmother patted the bed beside her. Brittany sat down. “Child, an old woman will say she is happy so you will keep her company,” she said. “You owe me an apology, and then you owe me a lesson.” Brittany blinked. “A lesson in what?” she asked. “In how to hem a dress yourself.”
I took my grandmother to an optometrist that same evening, a small office in Homewood that stayed open late. The doctor said she had been working on the edge of blindness for a year, and that the strain had worsened a cataract. He fitted her with a temporary pair of glasses and scheduled a surgery for the following month. When she walked out the door, she stopped on the sidewalk and stared up at the street sign, then at the stars, then at me. “Amber,” she said in a trembling voice, “I can see the moon.”
The money consequences were quick and real. Brittany wrote the check for eleven thousand, three hundred dollars, and she delivered it in a pink envelope, together with a handwritten card. She hired two seamstresses from a local sewing school and paid them fairly, and when she posted the correction online, to her great surprise, her followers doubled. They sent hundreds of messages to my grandmother, begging to buy an Opal original. Brittany sat at the kitchen table with her phone, reading the messages aloud, and Grandma pretended not to hear, but she smiled the whole time.
In the name of my grandmother, Opal, who has stitched a hundred wedding dresses in Jefferson County and never once signed her name to one, I started the Opal Thimble Fund. It pays for eye exams, reading glasses and fair wages for older seamstresses, quilters and tailors who do their work in the back rooms of the businesses of other people. In the first year, we gave out ninety two pairs of glasses. A tailor of eighty five, who had worked in the same alteration shop for fifty years, put on her new pair and said, “Oh, my. I had forgotten how pretty a seam can be.”
On a Sunday afternoon in spring, I sat on the porch of my grandmother with a glass of lemonade. Brittany was in the front room, bent over the old sewing machine, with the glasses of my grandmother sliding down her nose. A pale blue dress lay in her lap. Grandma sat beside her in a rocker, supervising. “Slower,” she said. “Let the needle do the work, honey. You are not racing anybody.” The machine hummed, steady and sweet. When Brittany finished the hem, she held it up to the light. It was crooked, and Grandma laughed, and so did she.
