Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “I’m not saying you’re not. But snippage . . . well, you couldn’t do that. Not yet. You’d have to cut the edges out exactly, sew them back without the seam showing. And what would you cut out? The flea won’t let you snip her. She’s not in the fabric. She’s outside of it.”
Ginnie Hempstock returned. She was carrying my old dressing gown. “I put it through the mangle,” she said. “But it’s still damp. That’ll make the edges harder to line up. You don’t want to do needlework when it’s still damp.”
She put the dressing gown down on the table, in front of Old Mrs. Hempstock. Then she pulled out from the front pocket of her apron a pair of scissors, black and old, a long needle, and a spool of red thread.
“Rowanberry and red thread, stop a witch in her speed,” I recited. It was something I had read in a book.
“That’d work, and work well,” said Lettie, “if there was any witches involved in all this. But there’s not.”
Old Mrs. Hempstock was examining my dressing gown. It was brown and faded, with a sort of a sepia tartan across it. It had been a present from my father’s parents, my grandparents, several birthdays ago, when it had been comically big on me. “Probably . . . ,” she said, as if she was talking to herself, “it would be best if your father was happy for you to stay the night here. But for that to happen they couldn’t be angry with you, or even worried . . .”
The black scissors were in her hand and already snip-snip-snipping then, when I heard a knock on the front door, and Ginnie Hempstock got up to answer it. She went into the hall and closed the door behind her.
“Don’t let them take me,” I said to Lettie.
“Hush,” she said. “I’m working here, while Grandmother’s snipping. You just be sleepy, and at peace. Happy.”
I was far from happy, and not in the slightest bit sleepy. Lettie leaned across the table, and she took my hand. “Don’t worry,” she said.
And with that the door opened, and my father and my mother were in the kitchen. I wanted to hide, but the kitten shifted reassuringly, on my lap, and Lettie smiled at me, a reassuring smile.
“We are looking for our son,” my father was telling Mrs. Hempstock, “and we have reason to believe . . .” And even as he was saying that my mother was striding toward me. “There he is! Darling, we were worried silly!”
“You’re in a lot of trouble, young man,” said my father.
Snip! Snip! Snip! went the black scissors, and the irregular section of fabric that Old Mrs. Hempstock had been cutting fell to the table.
My parents froze. They stopped talking, stopped moving. My father’s mouth was still open, my mother stood on one leg, as unmoving as if she were a shop-window dummy.
“What . . . what did you do to them?” I was unsure whether or not I ought to be upset.
Ginnie Hempstock said, “They’re fine. Just a little snipping, then a little sewing and it’ll all be good as gold.” She reached down to the table, pointed to the scrap of faded dressing gown tartan resting upon it. “That’s your dad and you in the hallway, and that’s the bathtub. She’s snipped that out. So without any of that, there’s no reason for your daddy to be angry with you.”
I had not told them about the bathtub. I did not wonder how she knew.
Now the old woman was threading the needle with the red thread. She sighed, theatrically. “Old eyes,” she said. “Old eyes.” But she licked the tip of the thread and pushed it through the eye of the needle without any apparent difficulty.
“Lettie. You’ll need to know what his toothbrush looks like,” said the old woman. She began to sew the edges of the dressing gown together with tiny, careful stitches.
“What’s your toothbrush look like?” asked Lettie. “Quickly.”
“It’s green,” I said. “Bright green. A sort of appley green. It’s not very big. Just a green toothbrush, my size.” I wasn’t describing it very well, I knew. I pictured it in my head, tried to find something more about it that I could describe, to set it apart from all other toothbrushes. No good. I imagined it, saw it in my mind’s eye, with the other toothbrushes in its red-and-white-spotted beaker above the bathroom sink.
“Got it!” said Lettie. “Nice job.”
“Very nearly done here,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.
Ginnie Hempstock smiled a huge smile, and it lit up her ruddy round face. Old Mrs. Hempstock picked up the scissors and snipped a final time, and a fragment of red thread fell to the tabletop.
My mother’s foot came down. She took a step and then she stopped.
My father said, “Um.”
Ginnie said, “ . . . and it made our Lettie so happy that your boy would come here and stay the night. It’s a bit old-fashioned here, I’m afraid.”
The old woman said, “We’ve got an inside lavvy nowadays. I don’t know how much more modern anybody could be. Outside lavvies and chamber pots were good enough for me.”