On the fifth morning, Tilda appeared in the doorway while Odora was oiling the treadle joint, the left one Garrick had identified, which had been stiff but had improved daily. She stood there with her arithmetic book in her arm and watched with the calculating attention she gave everything. It sounds different than I thought it would, Tilda said. How did you think it would sound? Louder.
Mama's machine sounded loud from the hallway when I was little, but I think I was smaller then, so everything was louder. Odora worked the joint twice more with the oil cloth. Would you like to hear it run? Tilda came into the room with the immediacy of someone who has been waiting to be asked. She stood cut close and watched as Odora threaded the machine, not with any particular project in mind, just demonstration thread, and set her foot to the treadle and began.
The machine moved smoothly. The sound of it filled the room, rhythmic and specific, the particular sound of a treadle in motion, which is not quite like any other sound. Tilda stood next to her and said nothing for a moment. Her face was doing several things at once, and she was letting it, which was unusual for Tilda, who generally presented a considered expression. "Mama used to let me sit on her lap when she sewed," she said.
"Not with sadness exactly, with the matter-of-fact quality of someone reporting something that is simply true. I was only five or six. I was too young to help. I just sat there. That's a good way to learn the sound of it, Odora said.
I remember the sound, Tilda said. I didn't know I remembered until right now. The machine ran. The afternoon light came in from the south window. After a while, Tilda sat down at the other chair at the worktable and opened her arithmetic book and worked while Odora sewed.
Nothing particular, a mending pile that had accumulated, and neither of them said anything else. And both of them were entirely comfortable with that. Bess came to the sewing room for a different reason. She came because she had found a tear in her new burgundy dress, the left sleeve, where she'd caught it on something at school, and she was distressed about it in a way she was trying not to be visibly distressed about, which meant she showed up in the doorway holding the dress with the particular stiffness of someone who has been practicing casualness. "It's just a small one," she said.
Odora looked at the tear. It was not large. It was in the sleeve seam and easy repair, invisible when finished. "Sit down," she said, best sat. She watched Odora thread the smallest needle in the set and select a thread that matched the wool closely enough to disappear.
And she watched the first stitch go in with the focused attention of someone who needs to believe the damage is fixable. "Will you be able to tell?" Bess asked. "No," Odora said. "I'm going to use the same stitch I used on the original seam.