PART 2 — THE PURSE
When the cake was cut, the old woman stood up and said, Victoria, before you marry my son, there is something you need to know about the woman you just mocked. Then she opened her purse.
She took out a small square of fabric, soft and white, edged with tiny hand-sewn flowers, and she held it up with shaking hands.
In 2020, she said, her little great-granddaughter passed away, and the family had nothing. They could not afford a dress to bury their baby in. They were ashamed, and they were broken, and they did not know what to do.
The woman Victoria called the help had stayed up three nights sewing a burial dress for a grieving familys little girl, every stitch by hand, and would not take a single dollar for it.
A seamstress from our church heard about it, the old woman said. She never asked. She just did it. Three nights without sleep, the most beautiful little dress you ever saw, so our baby could be laid to rest looking like the angel she was. And she would not take a penny.
This is a scrap I kept from the hem, the old woman said, holding up the square of fabric. I have carried it in my purse for four years. I prayed I would someday meet the woman who made it, so I could thank her.
Then she looked at Rose, and her eyes overflowed. It is you, she said. I would know this stitching anywhere.
Victoria, who is marrying this womans son, who called her own baby sister the help, who said her wedding dress cost more than Rose makes in a year, had gone white and silent.
Rose just refilled the punch and said she only did what any decent person would, that no family should have to bury a child without a proper dress. But the old woman crossed the room and held her, and the whole party watched a grieving great-grandmother weep into the shoulder of the seamstress.
Twenty-seven years of pins in her mouth and needles in her fingers, and my younger daughter also sewed a burial gown for a strangers child, by hand, through three sleepless nights, and never told a soul or took a dime.
Somebody has got to fix the zippers, Victoria had laughed. Somebody also has to sew, through her own tears, a dress for a baby who will never grow up. That is the woman my oldest daughter called the help.