The woman in the red fleece introduced herself as Alicia Fontaine, a senior designer at the outdoor company, and she held my Alaskan trail shoe by the frame as though it were a piece of fine china. She had the dust of the road on her boots and the polite, clear voice of a person who has stood in many cold places. Karen had come around the side of the garage and stood at the foot of the porch steps with her mouth slightly open. “Mrs. Maki,” the designer said again, to me, and then, with courtesy, turned to Karen. “I am sorry. Madam, the company paid five million dollars on Friday for twenty two patterns. This is pattern seventeen. Do you know why it was ten dollars?”
Karen said nothing. She is forty seven years old, thin and fair and tired around the eyes, with the same stubborn chin as her father, and she wore the apron of a woman who had been up since five. Dave, behind the cash box, had turned the color of the lawn chair. “Five million?” he said. He said it to the air. “Karen, did you hear her? Five million.” I stood up from the porch. I do it slowly, because of my back. I took the plastic bag with the brooch out of my pocket and held it where the light from the window fell on the little carved face. “Karen,” I said, “this is the cameo of my mother. It came from Finland in 1949, in her coat. And it is tagged as yours.”
She looked at it. Then, quite suddenly, she sat down on the bottom step. “Mom, I was going to put it back,” she said. “I was going to have it appraised, and put it back in the safe.” “Karen.” “It is the truth.” She pressed her hands against her eyes. “I wanted to know what it was worth. For the roof. For the taxes on this house, which I have been paying since Dad went. You never asked me about the taxes, Mom. You never asked how I paid them. You just kept making snowshoes, and nobody bought them, and I thought, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?”
A cameo brooch in a plastic bag lay on a kitchen counter beside a yard sale cash box and gave one snowshoe maker the afternoon to bring her daughter back to the shed.
I sat down next to her on the step. The wood was cold through my skirt. The freighter on the lake blew its horn again, far out, a long note that rolled across the whole town, and I thought of my father at the Ishpeming mine and the way he said a man should never be too proud to ask.
“Karen,” I said, “I did not ask because I was afraid of the answer. I was afraid that you would say it was hard, and I would have to say it was my fault.” She looked at me through her fingers. “I have been selling snowshoes for forty years at ten dollars a pair. You are right. Nobody could live on that. And I did nothing about it, because I was proud.”
Alicia Fontaine, who had been standing a polite distance away, tactfully busied herself with a sawhorse. Dave had slid down in his lawn chair, and the neighbor had found something urgent to do on the other side of the street. I took my daughter hand. It was calloused from the garden. “Karen, there is a check coming from the company of this woman. A big one. I did not tell you, because I wanted to see something, and I saw it, and I am not proud of the test.” I took a breath. “Half of it is yours. Not as a reward. As a wage. For eleven years of paying taxes and fixing the furnace and not once saying a word.”
She went completely still. “Mom.” “And the other half is the house. I want to pay the taxes through the end of my life, and then you will have it free and clear.” I smiled, because I could not help it. “But you will have to learn how to bend ash.” Karen laughed, a wet, choked laugh, and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist like a girl. “Mom, I cannot make a snowshoe.” “No one can,” I said. “That is why they cost forty dollars.” Alicia, from the sawhorse, coughed into her glove, and I could see she was trying not to smile.
The yard sale broke up quickly after that. Dave, who is not a bad man, only a weak one, took down the card table and the cardboard sign without a word. The teenager came back, sheepish, with the pair from 1988, and set them on the porch rail and would not take the ten dollars back. Karen walked to the kitchen and returned the brooch to its box. She pinned it herself to my collar. “Mom,” she said, “I did take it.” I said I knew. “But I want you to have this.” She clipped the clasp shut. It was on crooked. I left it that way.
We started the next Saturday, in the cold shed behind the house. I showed her how to steam the ash, and bend it over the form, and how to feel the grain with the thumb. Her first frame cracked. So did the second. The third held. Karen, who had never in her life made anything with her hands, stood holding it up to the light with an expression I will never forget.
She burned a letter into the tail with the hot iron. It was not a D. It was a K, a little crooked. Alicia Fontaine, who had come back from Chicago to see the shed, wrote it down in her notebook. The company sells that pair now. They are in the Marquette window.