Because there, folded away in the hidden drawer in the dark, was a thick envelope of money and a stack of papers, and a letter in the steady hand of my mother, and I understood at last why she left this machine to me and not to my sisters.
The papers were receipts. Decades of them. Because my mother, it turned out, had never just sewn for our family. For forty years she had quietly taken in sewing for half the town, mending and hemming and stitching wedding dresses late into the night, and saving every dollar she earned, a little at a time, in a drawer no one knew was there.
I put myself through a hard life one stitch at a time, she wrote, and I saved what I earned for the one of my girls who sat beside me and learned the work and loved it, and that was always you, so the machine is yours, and so is everything I sewed into its keeping.
Me. The daughter who sat at her knee and learned to sew. The one she was so quiet and certain about, in a way that puzzled the whole family for years.
My sisters never took to the needle. They found the machine old-fashioned, the work beneath them. But I loved it, and I loved her at it, and she knew, and she left it to me, and left inside it a lifetime of her own quiet industry, saved for the daughter who would understand what it cost and what it meant.
I sat on her old sewing stool and I wept, holding the receipts of forty years of a mother work I never fully saw, done late at night after we were all asleep, to give us a little more than we would have had.
The money is a real sum, more than a seamstress should have been able to save, saved anyway, one hem at a time, by a woman who never once complained.
I did not spend it on myself. I set most of it aside for her granddaughters, and I kept the machine running, and I sew on it still, the way she taught me, the way she hoped I would.
I take in a little sewing myself now, for the neighbors, the way she did, though I do not need to. It keeps her close. Every hem I turn, I feel her hands guiding mine, the way they did when I was a girl at her knee, learning the work she loved and left, in the end, to me alone.
Thirty-seven years that machine sat in my corner, holding my mother whole secret life in the dark. She left it to me because I was the one who loved the work. She was right. I always did. And now I know it was love, all along, stitched into every dollar and every dress.