The woman in the crane festival sweatshirt was named Dana Lindqvist, and she told us in a calm, clear voice that she was the vice president of product at the home goods company. She held my market basket in both hands, the red strands facing up, and she looked from the basket to the card table to the eighty baskets stacked in uneven towers, and then to the young woman in the lawn chair, who had gone absolutely rigid. “Mrs. Ostrom,” she said to me, with great courtesy. “The company paid three million, eight hundred thousand dollars on Friday for fifty four of your patterns. This is pattern nineteen.” She paused. “Why is it two dollars?”
Kaylee sprang to her feet. She is twenty four, round faced and quick, with a pierced nose and a bright careless laugh, and she said, “Oh, Madam, I think there is a mistake. This is our yard sale. We were helping clear some old things.” Logan had risen too. My grandson is twenty six, a big, awkward boy with sunburned ears, and he looked at the woman, and at the cash box in his girlfriends lap, and at me, up on the porch steps. “Grandma?” he said. His voice cracked on the second syllable. “Grandma, three point eight million?” I said that it was, and that I had not told him, and I was sorry.
Dana Lindqvist set the basket down on the table very gently. She looked at me with a quiet, level gaze. “Mrs. Ostrom, would you prefer that I step away?” I said no. I said I would like her to stay, because I wanted a witness. I took the folded receipt from my apron pocket and walked down the steps, one at a time, and laid it on the table beside the baskets, smoothing it flat. “Lot sixty one,” I read aloud. “Twelve Griswold cast iron skillets, sizes two through fourteen. Four thousand, one hundred dollars. Purchased from Logan Ostrom.” I looked at my grandson. “These were the skillets of my grandmother, Logan.”
A flock of cranes passed over a yard sale beside a table of woven baskets and gave one weaver the Saturday afternoon to bring her grandson back to the porch.
He was crying before I finished. It started in his eyes and came down his face in two clean lines, and he did not wipe them. “I needed the money,” he said. “I owed a man four thousand dollars. For a motorcycle. I thought if I paid him, he would not come to the house. And the skillets were just hanging there. And you never cooked with them anymore. I thought, nobody will notice.” His shoulders heaved. “But you noticed. You always notice everything.” Kaylee had gone white as the lawn chair. “Logan, you told me the skillets were yours,” she said. “You said you inherited them. You said Grandma gave them to you.”
“I did not,” I said. “I have not given anything to anyone in this family in two years that I did not give with my own hand.” I had not intended to say it so sharply. But a thing had gone out of me, a bolt that had held for a long time, and what came behind it was clear and plain. “Logan, I am not going to shout. I only want to say what I have waited to say. You moved into my house a year ago, to help. Kaylee moved in six months after. In all that time, neither of you has asked me one question about my baskets.” The cranes were coming over again, a high, bright, rattling cry. “Not one.”
Dana Lindqvist cleared her throat. She is a woman accustomed to difficult rooms, and she spoke with a gentle practicality. “Mrs. Ostrom, if it would be helpful, our company would be glad to arrange for a representative,” she said. “To retrieve the skillets. They are in a shop in Hastings, I believe, and I know the owner. It would not be difficult.” I thanked her. “And I wonder,” she went on, shyly, “if you might consider teaching a workshop.” I stared. “For our weavers. Our factory is going to make your patterns by machine, and I would like them to see how they are done by hand. Just once.”
I looked down at my hands, which are spotted now, and crooked at the joints. I have woven for seventy years. I have never thought of them as anything but tools. “I would be glad,” I said slowly. “But I will tell you one thing. I will not teach it if I do not teach my own family first.” I turned to Logan and Kaylee. “You two. Go in the house and wash your faces. Come out with a pair of scissors. And a pail of water.” They stared. “It is a Saturday, and I have eighty baskets to put back on my shelves, and I think we can make something while we do it.”
They came out with the scissors. We sat on the porch, the three of us, with the pail between us, and I showed them how to soak the willow until it was supple, and how to start the base with a cross of four stakes. The fingers of Logan were clumsy. Those of Kaylee were not, and she looked at them with a sort of dismay. “I have done this,” she said. “My grandmother. In Tennessee.” She laughed. “I forgot.” By dusk we had made two small trays, crooked, with raw ends, and the sandhill cranes went over, and for the first time I did not look up. I looked at my grandson. He was looking at his tray.
The skillets came home on a Thursday, wrapped in newspaper, in a cardboard box that Logan carried to the kitchen as if it held eggs. He had borrowed the money to buy them back, from a credit union, and it will take him two years to pay it. We hung them on the wall, one by one, from the smallest to the largest, and I stood back, and the light fell on them through the window above the sink.
They looked exactly as they did when I was seven. On the bottom of the third basket we made that day, the one Logan wove, there were three strands. They were not red. He had used the only dye he could find, which was blue. I have kept it.