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I had to hold them away from me to read: O remember that my life is wind. I knew I had read those words but couldn’t place them.
    When I looked up, Abigail smiled.
    “It’s not what it seems to be at first,” I yelled in her direction. “The girl. The teeth. Where is the quote from?”
    “Hollering is not helpful,” she said loudly. “A firm loud voice will do the trick. Job. ‘O remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good.’”
    I said nothing.
    “They don’t see it, you know.” Abigail stroked a hearing-aid cord as she tilted her head. “Most of them. They see only what they expect to see, sugar, not spice, if you comprehend my meaning. Even your mother took her time noticing them. Of course, the eyesight around these parts isn’t too hot. I started doing it, oh, it was years ago, at my crafts club, made my own patterns, but it wouldn’t do to come right out with it—up front—you know, so I began what I came to call the private amusements, little scenes within scenes, secret undies, if you understand. Take a gander at the next one. It’s got a door.”
    I laid the small blanket on my lap and looked down at needlepoint roses, yellow and pink on a black background, with leaves in various greens. The stitching was flawless. There were also tiny pastel buttons sewn here and there into the floral motif. No door.
    “One of the buttons opens, Mia,” she said. Her voice shook as she spoke, and I could sense her excitement.
    After fumbling with several buttons, I looked up to see Abigail grab her walker, raise herself twice before she pushed herself up off her seat, and begin to move slowly toward me—walker tap, step, tap, step. Once she had arrived, her lowered head poised just above my own, she gestured toward a yellow button. “That one. Then pull.”
    I pushed the button through a hole and pulled. The rose fabric gave way to a different view. The image on my lap was another needlepoint, but this one was dominated by a huge gray-blue vacuum cleaner, complete with an Electrolux label on its flank. The thing was not grounded but airborne, a flying machine guided by a disproportionately small, mostly naked woman—she wore only high heels—who sailed alongside it in the blue sky, commandeering its long hose. The household appliance was engaged in the business of sucking up a miniature town below. I studied the two legs of a tiny man that stuck out from the bottom of the attachment and the hair of another pulled upward by the air, his mouth open in terror. Cows, pigs, and chickens, a church, and a school had all been uprooted and were soon to be digested by the hungry hose. Abigail had worked hard on the suction disaster scene; each figure and building had been rendered in tiny precise stitches. Then I saw the miniature sign that said BONDEN hovering just outside the vacuum’s mouth. I thought of the hours of work and the pleasure that must have pushed her forward, a secret pleasure, one touched by anger or revenge or at the very least a gleeful feeling of vicarious destruction. Many days, perhaps months, had gone into creating this “undie.”
    A low sound came from my throat, but I don’t think she heard it. I looked at her, nodded, smiled my appreciation, and said, careful not to yell, “It’s great.”
    Abigail slowly returned to the sofa. I waited through the taps and steps, and then through the lowering ritual that began with a double-fisted grip on the walker and concluded with a rocking drop into the seat cushion. “Did it in fifty-seven,” she said. “Too much for me now. My fingers won’t cooperate, the work’s too fine.”
    “You had to hide it?”
    She nodded, then smiled. “I was spitting mad at the time. Made me feel better.”
    Abigail did not elaborate, and I felt too much the outsider to press her. We sat together for a while without speaking. I watched the old Swan munch her cookie very neatly, gingerly wiping away a few crumbs that had settled at the corner