I. The Second Key

On my last Monday in the shop, a young woman came in with a ticket I had written in 1999. It was yellow, the yellow of paper that started out pink, and the number was 608. On the back somebody had drawn a box around the word THURSDAY.

“Which Thursday?” I asked.

“My grandmother couldn't remember either.”

I took the ticket to the window. The first digit wasn't a six. It was a zero with a hook through it, the way Mara had written zeroes so they couldn't be taken for anything else. Over the years I had seen that zero on invoices, rent checks, a note telling me which container of leftovers had onions in it. I could have recognized it upside down.

“Your grandmother's name?”

“Esther Larkin. I'm Celia.”

I turned the ticket over. ESTHER was printed in large, careful capitals. Under it was the thing we'd agreed to do: CATCH HEM, FIX INSIDE POCKET. There wasn't a price.

“What's the garment?” I asked.

“A mustard coat. She thinks it had a blue lining. She wants it back for a thing we're doing at the library.”

Behind Celia, through the door, I could see the metal ramp that the new owner had installed so the contractors could roll things in and out. She planned to make the downstairs into two apartments. She had offered to sell me the door, after I mentioned I would miss it, and I had explained that there was nothing I could do with a blue door I couldn't go through.

“When's the thing?” I asked.

“Saturday. It's an exhibit about people who worked at night. Grandma cleaned offices and hotel kitchens. I interviewed her for it.” Celia noticed my cardboard boxes for the first time. “I thought you'd already closed. Then she said to try the blue door anyway.”

I should have told her the likelihood of a coat surviving twenty-seven years in a place where six owners had gone through the upstairs apartments. Instead I asked her to leave a number. She tore a piece of paper out of a notebook and wrote it down. When she left she closed the door with both hands. If you let it go by itself, it bounced.

There were four keys to the shop in a bowl under the counter. Mine was on my ring. A third key had gone home in the pocket of a man who repaired the pressing machine and retired without ever answering his phone again. The second key, the one we used to keep on a hook next to the switch, was still out.

I took my phone into the workroom. There was a number for Mara in it with no last name. We hadn't needed last names at the time I got a phone with enough memory to store them. I looked at our last exchange. I had sent her a picture of a package that came for her in November of 2010. She had written, Leave it on the back step. I hadn't told her I'd brought it inside when it started raining.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“It's Elena,” I said.

“I know. Your name came up.”

“Do you still have a key to the shop?”

“I thought I'd brought it back.”

“You brought back the one for the register.”

She didn't say anything for a few seconds. On the line there was the sound of somebody taking a paper bag apart.

“I have to be out on Thursday,” I said. “I'm looking for a coat. Do you remember a customer called Esther Larkin?”

“Blue lining,” she said.

I had expected several things from the call. I had not expected her to remember a lining faster than I had remembered a name. I held the old ticket so hard I could feel it crease.

“Could you come down?” I asked.

“I can be there at three. What have you done with the kettle?”

“I still have the kettle.”

“Good. I have three cups in my car. I don't know how they've got there.”

I put the phone down. I could have spent the time until three looking for the coat. Instead I went down the hall to the door at the rear of the building and tried to remember when it had been a different colour. I knew it had been, because we had bought a tin of blue paint on a Sunday and used the cardboard from a box of oranges to protect the step. There was a thin stripe of the old colour under the letter slot. It was white. I'd been convinced it was red.

II. Clothing at the End of the Line

Mara arrived at three ten wearing a jacket I had made for her before I knew what a sleeve head was. It still buckled between her shoulder and her neck. She had had it lined since then, and when she took it off I saw the lining was black. I'd imagined her getting rid of the thing every time I'd thought about it, which had not been often, except for a whole year when I thought about it whenever I saw a badly set sleeve.

“This is still your jacket,” she said.

“I don't think that's how presents work.”

She put three cups on the counter. One had a chipped handle. She gave that one to herself, as she always had. I took it away and got her the brown cup from the cupboard instead. She raised her eyebrows at me. I found I still knew what that meant.

“Where did we keep the holds?” she asked.

“On the rack behind the screen. When I moved the screen, I put them in the cabinet with the old buttons.”

“What did you do with them when they got old?”

I looked at her. I had done something with them. For the first several years I called the people whose numbers still worked. Then I made a sign for the window. I kept the clothes that seemed to have stories attached to them and donated the things that looked as though people had bought them in a hurry.

“The cabinet's upstairs now,” I said.

We took the narrow stairs that ran along the side of the building. Halfway up, the light from the back hall stopped and the light from the stairwell hadn't begun. I had asked the old landlord to fix that gap for twelve years. In the end he'd put a bulb in his truck to bring to me and sold the truck.

The cabinet was in what had once been a nursery. A line of stickers was still visible above the baseboard where a child had tried to make a road for a paper rabbit. Behind the cabinet, somebody had painted an experimental strip of yellow. In twenty years nobody had decided whether they liked it enough to do the whole wall.

Inside were seven garments, each inside a pillowcase with a ticket tied to a button or a belt loop. Mara pulled the cases out one by one and handed them to me. A dinner jacket. A pair of blue jeans with one leg turned up. A christening gown so small I could fold it twice and hold it in the palm of my hand. The things I had forgotten about in their separate packages made more sense together. It was what you would wear, if you had only this cabinet to dress from, to a set of occasions no one could reasonably go to in the same year.

There was no mustard coat.

“It had to go in the high cupboard,” Mara said. “It smelled of something.”

“Smoke?”

“Peppermint.”

She went downstairs first. The high cupboard was above the sink in the workroom. I had last opened it during a plumbing leak to look for the stopcock. Mara pushed a chair against the wall, put one foot on it and then looked around for me.

“Would you hold it?”

I held the chair by the back. She could have asked me before she put a foot up. She would have asked me before she put a foot up, when we had the shop together. I let the difference go. When she leaned forward, the bottom of the cabinet door moved against her hair.

There were no clothes inside. There was a box from a store that had been closed since I was thirty. A bunch of ribbons in a rubber band. A rolled pattern, tied with string. She passed each thing down. At the very back she found a stack of receipt books, heavy enough that she took one of my hands off the chair to pass it to me.

“These are yours,” she said.

I sat on the worktable and looked through the first book. There were six coats in it before I came to Esther's. Her alterations were written in Mara's hand. Beside the first line there was a check mark. Beside the second was an empty box.

“So it never went on the holds rack,” I said.

Mara came down from the chair. She leaned over my shoulder and followed the page with a finger. At the bottom of the duplicate ticket was a set of initials. E.V. Mine. After that, in a hurried hand that didn't look like either of ours, were the words LEFT AT L. DUTTON.

“Who was L. Dutton?” I asked.

Mara looked into her cup. “Your first landlady.”

III. The Room with the Low Ceiling

Lorna Dutton had lived in the upstairs apartment when Mara and I first opened the shop. We didn't know that a landlady was supposed to stay in a different building. She came down every afternoon with a newspaper, folded it to the crossword, and complained that the editor had never done a crossword in his life. If we didn't pay attention, she did it out loud.

Before we opened she had let us use an upstairs room for storing fabric. It had a ceiling so low we had put tape on the beam at forehead height. I couldn't remember how long we'd used it. Mara said about a year. I said we had used it when we stopped working together, because I remembered bringing down three rolls of fabric and having to make room for them behind the register.

“It was winter,” Mara said.

I was surprised she remembered the season. I remembered the picture on the telephone book that year and the green cap on the bottle of water I brought to the shop, and sometimes I remembered her father wearing two right-hand gloves. I had spent a great deal of time insisting that I remembered exactly what happened. The things I remembered had never made the case I wanted them to make.

On the afternoon she told me she needed to go to New Jersey, I had been making the train of a wedding dress shorter by an inch. The dress was heavy. There were three people waiting behind the bride. Mara took two appointments and then put up a notice saying we would be closed indefinitely. I found out when the bride left and somebody knocked to ask whether we'd be able to finish the suit he had brought us.

“Indefinitely isn't forever,” Mara had said.

“It isn't a date either.”

Her father had been caught by a neighbour driving on the wrong side of a road he had used every day for thirty years. Mara's brother had gone down for a weekend and come back saying Dad seemed fine. She had found the piece of paper in the car on which their father had written his own address in case anybody asked him. It was information I didn't have that first afternoon. What I had was a woman in a wedding dress who thought I was going to close the shop with her dress in it.

The agreement we'd reached a week later was simple on paper. I would pay her for her half of the shop over four years. She would keep the money she had in her own account. We would tell the landlord and the customers when we had finished telling each other. I did pay her, down to the last dollar. I also told people she'd left to take care of her father whenever I wanted to sound generous, and told people she walked out whenever I wanted to be asked how I had managed.

“Lorna did have the coat,” Mara said in the workroom. “I remember putting a bag of peppermints in the pocket to identify it.”

“Why would we need to identify it?”

“We sent two things upstairs the day the boiler was cleaned. I was worried Lorna would send one off with the dry cleaning if she didn't know it belonged to us.”

“But you wrote my initials.”

Mara looked at the ticket. “I must have told you I was leaving it there.”

We could have stopped there, with that familiar piece of ground between us. I could have said she hadn't told me. She could have said of course she'd told me and the fact that I didn't remember was the problem. For years I had wondered how our conversations would go if she came back. Nearly all the versions I thought of had been that version.

“How would you find it now?” I asked.

Mara held up the ticket and read it again. “I'd find Lorna.”

“She's eighty-seven. She lives on the other side of town.”

“Good. I was afraid you were about to say she was dead.”

I got Lorna's number from the back of a Christmas card she had sent me eight years ago. It still worked. When I told her we were looking for a yellow coat from 1999, she was quiet for a long time. I thought she might be trying to work out which coat. What she was trying to work out, it turned out, was whether I knew how old she was.

“Bring the ticket,” she said. “I'll see if I can find the book.”

IV. The Book of Borrowed Things

Lorna's apartment had a white front door with a piece of tape where the peephole should have been. She'd covered it because the young man across the hall liked to practise his trumpet with the door open, and if she looked through the peephole there was an excellent chance she would see him. She preferred to imagine him far away.

She let us in and pointed to two chairs, neither of which had enough room around it for a person to sit down with a coat on. Mara took our coats to the kitchen. I sat with the ticket balanced on my knee. A man in a photograph on a sideboard had raised one hand toward a camera. If you stood at the door it looked like he was waving you into the room.

“Everything I kept for other people went into a book,” Lorna said. “Because they were always saying I hadn't given it back. Then I started giving things back with a note saying I had given them back. People said they hadn't had the note.”

She brought us a binder, the kind with a plastic sleeve on the front. Inside the sleeve was a picture of a plum. She said she had originally meant to use the binder for recipes.

We went through it page by page. The first entries were about keys, money for a window, and the number of a plumber who wouldn't work on Saturdays. Between the pages was a theatre ticket that Lorna wouldn't let us throw away, although the play had ended twenty years ago and she could no longer remember who went with her. On a page with our old address in the corner there was an entry for a brown bag and a yellow coat.

“I brought that coat downstairs,” Lorna said, putting her finger on the line. “It was cold and I didn't want to be going up and down in the cold. I left it with a woman who used to collect things for you.”

“What woman?”

“She wore a very nice hat. Always had a different one. The best one was a brown felt thing with a feather coming out sideways.”

I could see the hat before I could see the woman. It belonged to Grace Cho, who had a dry-cleaning shop on the next street. If a client brought something in that needed more than she could do without taking it apart, she sent it to us. If we needed something cleaned, we sent it to her. We owed each other eighteen dollars each at one point and argued about whose debt cancelled whose.

“Grace will have kept a record,” I said.

“Of the coat?” Lorna shut the book. “Grace will have kept the coat.”

When we left, Mara didn't go straight to her car. She sat beside me on the low wall in front of Lorna's building. The mortar was loose under my shoe. If you sat far enough toward the end, you could see a woman in the ground-floor apartment putting the same plant on four different windowsills to find out where it looked right.

“Why is this coat important?” Mara asked.

“It's important to Esther.”

“I know. I mean, why do you want to find it?”

The woman put the plant back on the first windowsill. It looked quite good there. I put the ticket into my bag and closed the zip.

“When the girl asked me for it,” I said, “I wanted to be able to bring it out. I wanted there to be one thing I could bring out of the shop and give to the person it belonged to.”

Mara picked a piece of mortar off the wall. She put it back into the hole it had come from. “Then we should try Grace,” she said.

V. The Heavy Pocket

Grace had moved her business to a shopping centre where you could buy a new pair of shoes, eat a doughnut, and have the trousers that showed too much of the shoes shortened. She'd taken the original counter with her. If you leaned on the end next to the register, it still gave a little.

She recognized Mara before she recognized me, which surprised both of us.

“You were the one who could get a whole sofa cover into a grocery bag,” Grace said.

“Only if there wasn't a sofa in it.”

Grace turned to me. “And you could write on a piece of masking tape without getting ink on your fingers. I've never been able to do that.” She wiped her hands, which had nothing on them, on the front of her sweater. “What are you after?”

We told her. She took a minute to think. Then she got a ring of keys out from under the counter. There must have been twenty. She chose one without looking at it and unlocked a closet with the word PRIVATE on the door. Inside, hanging from a metal rail, were ten or twelve cloth bags. Each had a paper tag with a hole punched through it. Grace showed us a bag with a yellow tag. On the tag she'd written E. LARKIN, VIA L. DUTTON.

“She was in before the move,” Grace said. “She asked me to keep it. I told her she'd have to pick it up because I had to pay someone to move these things. Then the moving men were standing there looking at the rail, and it cost the same whether there were nine on it or ten.”

Mara lifted the bag down. She held it by the top and let me undo the zipper. The coat was ochre in daylight and almost brown under the fluorescent tubes. The sleeves were wide enough to wear over a sweater. The buttons on the right were wood. The buttons on the left were black plastic, and there was no way to tell whether Esther had intended anyone to notice the difference. When I lifted the front, the blue lining shone in the light from the window.

“Look,” Mara said. She held one of the pockets open, the inside one. A piece of the pocket had been folded upward and caught in a line of red stitches. It made a pouch just deep enough for two fingers. At the edge of it a brass safety pin hung open.

I remembered making the stitches. Esther had stood with her coat on, pointing to the place where she wanted the top of the pocket to be. She had explained that what she needed from a pocket was to reach into it and find the same thing in the same place, even in a dark room. A big pocket gave you an opportunity to look for something when the thing was already in your hand. I had folded the cloth up, tacked it in place, and told her I would do it properly when she had taken the coat off.

“I did the hem first,” Mara said. “She asked me to let it down again.”

I turned the hem over. She had done exactly that. There was a line of tiny pale holes where the first stitching had been, and a second fold just underneath it.

“You know why?” I asked.

“She wanted it long enough to cover her knees on the bus. The bus was colder than she expected.”

Grace brought over a pencil so I could write Celia's phone number on the back of the tag. Then she pulled it toward herself and dialled it on the phone at the register, where I had expected her to let me take the coat away without asking.

“Tell your grandmother it's Grace,” she said when Celia picked up. “Elena and Mara are here. Do you want me to give them your coat or do you want to come get it yourself?”

She waited for Celia to ask Esther. I heard a voice on the other end, close to the receiver, followed by a laugh that didn't seem to have come from Celia. Grace listened, said she would, and hung up.

“She wants you to bring it to her. At her house. She's made coffee.”

“She's made coffee already?” Mara asked.

“It's three o'clock,” Grace said. “She thought she'd have some whether you found her coat or not.”

VI. Without the Lining

Esther lived in a second-floor apartment with a rail running up both sides of the stairs. A wire basket at the bottom of one rail held a pair of soft slippers. Celia answered the door in socks and told us to leave our shoes wherever we wouldn't trip over them. Mara took hers off. I had a hole in one stocking and left mine on. Nobody said anything.

There were two young people on the floor with notebooks. One had brought a recorder. Esther was sitting in an armchair with a short silver chain attached to her glasses. I remembered her making me shorten a pair of trousers until the cuff was at exactly the height of the top stair in her building. The first time I did it I'd assumed I knew what she meant. The second time she'd asked me to come outside and look at the stair.

“Give it here,” she said when she saw the bag.

I gave it to her. She pushed the bag down around the coat and took one sleeve in each hand. For a few seconds she pulled on the sleeves with the expression of somebody checking a grocery bag for a hole. Then she pulled the coat up over her head, sat down again, and drew it around her knees.

“That's the thing,” she said.

The boy with the recorder reached forward to make sure it was on. Esther watched him. “Have you got the part where I told you we were eating our dinner on a filing cabinet?”

He nodded.

“Good. That was more important than the coat.”

Celia handed out coffee. I sat with mine and listened to Esther explain why she'd brought the coat in. There had been money going missing from her locker in the hotel where she worked. She'd decided she would keep her bus fare on her own body. The coat went to the dry cleaner's after the hotel changed contractors. The contractor paid the last week's wages late. By the time it was paid, Esther had got a job with a different uniform, and then a bus that came less often but was heated. She borrowed her sister's coat for an entire winter and left the mustard one with Grace.

“I'd have got it sooner,” Esther said. “Then I got a jacket with a hood. You girls ever try to bring an umbrella onto a crowded bus? A hood will change your life.”

Mara, who had taken two umbrellas into a department store and come out with neither, said that she believed it.

The young people were planning to put the coat on a stand under a large photograph of the hotel. They'd brought a mock-up of the label. Esther read it, taking her glasses off and holding them above the paper. She circled the words “a rare surviving uniform.”

“It wasn't their uniform,” she said. “I bought it off a woman at church. It was twelve dollars. I wore it to work because I owned it.”

Celia picked up a pencil.

“And if you've got it on a stand with the good side out,” Esther continued, “nobody's going to be able to see where they put the pocket. That's what I was telling you about.”

She took the coat off and turned one side all the way back. I saw the safety pin again, and the red stitches. I offered to put the pocket in properly, as I'd offered years ago.

“Could you make it hold a quarter?” she asked. “So that when somebody puts a hand in, they know how it worked.”

“I can make it hold a quarter.”

She put her hand in the lining. It came out with a folded piece of paper, so soft at the crease that the top nearly parted from the bottom. It was an old bus transfer with a printed time across one edge.

“I'd like that to stay with it,” she said. “Can you fit them both in?”

I tried. The transfer and a quarter would fit once the pocket was repaired. I told her so. Then I asked whether she wanted the old red stitches left in place.

“You can leave them if they don't get in your way,” she said.

I thought about how simple that permission was. I took out my notebook and wrote her name at the top of a clean page. Underneath I wrote what she had asked us to do. Before we left, I showed it to her.

VII. Our Two Versions

It was getting dark by the time we went back to the shop. On the street a woman was sitting in a car with the engine on, trying to see what time was printed on our window. I had taken the hours down on Friday. There was a shadow of them in the dust on the glass.

Mara put the coat on the worktable and I went to make tea. I put enough water in the kettle for both of us, knowing perfectly well that making somebody tea wasn't an answer to anything. From the kitchen I heard the coat slide off the hanger, then the sound of Mara turning it to look at the hem.

“Do you want me to come in tomorrow?” she called.

“Yes,” I said. Then I asked her how long she could stay.

“Till one. I told my daughter I'd be somewhere with her in the afternoon.”

I brought the tea through. Mara made room for it on the table. I saw that she had taken the key out of her bag. It was on an old piece of braided cord that I recognized from the shop, though the blue had almost entirely gone out of it.

“I thought you wanted this back,” she said.

“I did. You can keep it until Thursday, if you're coming in.”

“You haven't asked whether I want it.”

I put the cups down. “Do you?”

She took time to answer. “For tonight, yes. I don't know why.”

I put my hand on the edge of the coat. The fabric was stronger than it looked. “I've told people you left me to close the shop,” I said. “I ought to tell you that.”

Mara set her tea down without drinking. “What did you say?”

“That I came in and found a notice on the door. That I had to buy your half or lose the place.”

“You knew I was going. I'd told you I needed six weeks.”

“You told me you needed to go down and see your father. I didn't know that meant I had to finish two months of work by myself. And then you put the notice up before you'd talked to me.”

“I did.” She picked up the key and set it down again with the teeth facing the other way. “And you told the landlord I'd agreed to sell before I'd agreed to sell. He called me at my father's house. I don't even know how he got the number.”

“I gave it to him. He needed to know who was paying the rent.”

I heard it as soon as I said it. In the old story I told, the rent was a thing looming over me that I had managed to get out from under. In this one I was the person who had sent a landlord to a house with a sick man in it. Both things had happened. I wished very much that one of them could make the other less true.

“I should have called you first,” I said.

“I wish you had. I would have agreed anyway. I couldn't keep being in two places.” She looked at the worktable. “But I might have had a better answer to you than sending the key back in a bag.”

“You didn't send this key.”

“No. I wanted to be able to get in. I didn't think I would actually do it. I just didn't want to be somebody who couldn't get in.”

I let the kettle click on behind us, because I had forgotten to turn it off at the wall. We listened until it clicked off again. Then Mara asked if there was anything I wanted to say about the account, since we were talking about everything else. I told her I'd paid it. She said she knew. I told her I'd resented the money. She said she knew that, too.

“I wanted you to know I paid it even after I'd decided I'd never see you again.”

“What would that have changed?”

“I don't know. I think I wanted there to be something good about how I did it.”

She unfolded one side of the coat, the side with the black buttons. “There was,” she said. “You paid it.”

VIII. The Last Fitting

On Tuesday my niece Jo brought a pair of trousers to the shop. She was seventeen and had been working out where she wanted to go after high school. She had made a list of five places, three of them in cities her mother had told her weren't cities. She left the list on the counter when she went behind the screen to change.

“I won't be here to shorten things for free next week,” I told her.

“I know. That's why I've brought the long ones.”

She came out wearing one shoe. I knelt to pin the cloth around the foot that had a shoe on it and asked whether she had ever sewn a hem herself. She said she had, but the first one had come down on the bus and the second one had pulled a line through the outside of the cloth.

“That's two things you know can happen,” I said.

“You make it sound like I've learned something.”

I asked her to get a piece of scrap out of the drawer. We sat at the table together. I showed her where to put her fingers so she could feel when the needle had picked up a thread on the outside. When she did it herself, she caught too much. On her third try she caught so little it wouldn't hold. On her fourth she caught the right amount and couldn't tell she'd done it. I asked her to look at the outside.

“Oh,” she said.

Mara came in while we were still at the table. She'd got a bag of food for lunch and was planning to put it down on the one clear chair. She saw Jo's shoe on it and put the bag on the floor.

“That's Mara,” I told Jo. “We started this place together.”

Jo looked from one of us to the other. “I thought you started it with a man.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Mom said your old partner left to take care of his father.”

“Her father,” Mara said. “How's your mother?”

“Busy,” Jo said. “She says to ask what you've done with the machine.”

The big pressing machine was due to be collected that afternoon. The plain old sewing machine, the one you could move without a truck, was standing under the window. I had used the same machine every working day for twenty years and hadn't decided what to do with it.

“Why?” I asked.

“At the library they have a room for groups. I told Celia you might know how to teach something there.”

I looked at Jo. “I might. I don't know that I want to.”

“I said might,” she told me. “She wrote it down as might. It's on the list.”

She went around to the other side of the table to show Mara her hem. Mara said it was good. She didn't tell her how to do it better until Jo asked. I went to look out the window. There was a red spot on the side of the truck the people with the new apartments had brought. I thought at first it was a light. It was a scarf somebody had tied to the door handle so they could tell which truck was theirs.

I went back to Jo and asked if she wanted me to show her how to turn the other leg up. She said she would like to try it herself first. I brought her the pincushion and put it on the table within reach.

IX. Two Inches of Blue

We worked on the coat on Wednesday morning. I had expected Mara to arrive before me, because she still had the key. She waited outside. She said she had stopped for a bagel and, once she had finished the bagel, couldn't work out how to open the door with the paper in her hand. There was a wastebasket a foot from where she was standing. I pointed it out. She went around the back of it and found there was a small slot in the lid where you could put paper. By the time she came back she had the key in her hand.

“You go first,” I said.

She opened the door. It still bounced when she let it go.

Inside, I took the coat out of the garment bag. The air smelled more like the shop when we had nothing in it than it had smelled when it was full of clothes. There was wet wool, machine oil, and a warm dry smell from the ledge where the sun hit the floor. The people with the red scarf on the truck had taken away our pressing machine. There was a thin black line on the floor where one of its feet had been. I put my own chair in that spot. It gave me room to stretch my legs while I worked.

Mara had brought a length of blue cotton from home to patch the pocket. I laid it against the lining. It was so close in colour that it made me want to use it even after I realized it was too heavy. I slid it aside and cut two inches off a remnant of blue that had faded around the edges. In the seam the difference would show. I asked Mara to hold the ends while I looked for a thread.

“You've still got the red,” she said.

“I've got every colour of red we ever bought.”

I opened the top drawer. Inside was a spool the colour of a fire engine and a spool the colour of the darkest bit of a cherry. Between them there was a paper packet with three short lengths of faded red. I had wound them onto card. In pencil on the card I had written “red from Grace's.”

Grace had loaned us the thread one day when the woman who supplied us with notions had shut for a funeral. I remembered Esther in the changing room asking if we had a pin, and then pointing to the place on her coat where she could reach into the pocket without undoing a button. I had been eager to show her how to do it. She had kept moving my hand to the place she had meant.

“It was this red,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because I wrote it down on the card.”

Mara lifted the card to read it. I took a strand, ran it through my fingers and found it was still good. We did not replace the old stitches. I put a new line beside them that took the weight off the torn cloth. Mara held the lining away from the needle. A couple of times my fingers got stiff. I laid the needle down and opened my hand flat until they were ready to do what I asked of them.

At the end we had a pocket that could hold a quarter, a transfer, and a folded ticket if Esther wanted to put the ticket in it. Mara brought a quarter from the register drawer. It stuck for a second at the narrow part of the opening, then went down. I felt for it with my eyes closed and found it exactly where Esther had said it should be.

“Can I keep the quarter?” Mara asked.

“What for?”

“There's a meter outside.”

I handed her the coin. She looked at it, turned it over, and gave it back. She had a different quarter in her pocket, she said. We'd tested this one. I slipped it in with the transfer and made a note in the book so Esther would know it was there.

Around ten I asked Mara what she was doing on Saturday after the opening. She said she was going home. Her daughter was going to take the kids to the movies. She would have an afternoon to herself for the first time in a month.

“Do you want to come get a coffee on the way?” I asked.

“I think I want the afternoon. But I can come next week.”

We took out our phones and found a day that wasn't a Saturday. I wrote it down on the piece of paper where I had put Esther's number. We sat for another minute on either side of the coat, until Mara stood up and put her jacket on. I saw the buckle in the sleeve again. She caught me looking at it.

“I'm not asking you to fix it,” she said.

“I know.”

She moved her arm and the fabric fell where it had been falling since I had made it. It was the place her shoulder was.

X. The Door in Place

On Thursday, at nine, the building smelled of coffee and plaster. An electrician had opened the wall behind the cabinet upstairs. In the space between the studs was a folded newspaper, a spoon, and several inches of blue wool that belonged to something nobody was ever going to find the rest of. He asked if any of it was mine. I said I had been in the building long enough to want it to be, and the wool was the only thing I could take without having to think about where to put it. He got it out with a pair of long pliers. It was so thin I could see through it.

The new owner, Diane, came with a roll of drawings and a box of coffee. She set them down on the counter, which she'd asked the contractors to leave until the end. On the drawings the building appeared to be completely empty. You could see through it from one end to the other and know precisely what every part of it was for. In the part that had been the workroom there were two rooms, one with a round table drawn on the floor.

“Is that really where the table goes?” I asked.

“It's where a table could go,” Diane said. “I don't know whose table it'll be.”

“That's nice,” I said, and I meant it. There were plans people made for other people's lives that were so finished by the time the people got to them that there was no room to put anything down. I had been making some of those plans for myself over the last month. I had told everybody I was going to spend the first week sleeping. The closer I came to the end of the lease, the less I slept.

Diane offered the door again. I looked at it from inside. On the inside it was the colour of sand, from a tin of paint the owner before her had left in the cellar. For some reason I had only thought of it from outside when I'd told her I would miss it.

“Do you need to take it off?” I asked.

“It needs a new closer. The frame's sound.”

“Could you leave it on?”

“I can ask about a closer.” She unrolled a little more of the plans, then took her hand off them. “Do you want the shop name to stay anywhere?”

I looked at the glass where the name had been. Mara and I had stuck the letters up ourselves with tape. The letters were slightly uphill. We used to argue about whether that was because the door was downhill. I wanted to remember being able to argue with her about it. I didn't need somebody who lived in the apartment to spend the next twenty years explaining why there was the name of a sewing shop on her front door.

“I took the letters down,” I said.

Diane nodded. She took a pen from her back pocket and made a note about the closer. When she left I went through the rooms to see if there was anything more I wanted to take. In the room with the low beam I pulled one strip of tape off the wall. It came up in two pieces and left a cleaner place underneath it. I put both pieces in the wastebasket.

Mara came at eleven, in time to carry the sewing machine out with me. It was still in its wooden case, which was the only good reason for it to be as heavy as it was. We stopped once on the ramp. I held the case while she moved a corner of a rug that was sticking out of the truck. Then we got it into the back of my car without dropping it.

“Home?” she asked.

“Home,” I said. “I haven't decided about the library.”

She closed the hatch and stayed beside me while I went back to give Diane the keys. I took mine off the ring. Mara looked at the one on the blue cord, undid the knot with her thumbnail, and put it in Diane's hand. It was ordinary brass, a little brighter where the cord had been. She folded the cord up and put it in her pocket.

We waited on the pavement for a school bus to pass. On the other side of the street there was a man selling pears out of the back of a pickup. Mara asked if I wanted one. I told her I wanted two. She crossed the road with me and picked up a pear by the stem. The man put it in a paper bag along with one that was a little bruised on the side. Mara pointed out the bruise. He asked if she wanted another.

“No,” she said. “I'm going to eat it now.”

We paid for the pears and ate them standing beside my car. A contractor came down the ramp behind us carrying a ladder. He turned it on its side to get it out through the door, the way we used to turn a roll of cloth. Before he went back in, he pulled the door closed behind him. It bounced once, then shut.

XI. In Her Own Words

At the library, they put the coat on a stand with the lining facing out. From the front you could see the folded pocket. From the back you could see the wooden buttons and the uneven wear at the cuffs. Celia had made a little drawing of the pocket on the label, so that people could find it without having to touch it. The quarter was still in there. They had put the transfer in a clear envelope next to the stand, with Esther's permission, because it was too fragile for everybody who came through to reach in and take it out.

The title of the exhibit was On the Night Shift. There was a picture of a commercial kitchen with the clean pans turned upside down. There was a tape of a woman describing the best thing about being the only person in a department store at three in the morning, which was that she could hear the woman who worked on the floor below her singing. There was a map with the routes of buses no longer in service. People stopped at the map and told each other where they used to wait. Sometimes they disagreed by a whole block. One man asked a woman what she had been doing on the other side of the street. She told him she had been catching the bus in the other direction.

Esther wore the jacket with the hood. She took it off, hung it on the back of a chair, and went over to see the coat. The new label said it was her own. She read the label all the way through, then asked Celia why she had left the price out. Celia said there hadn't been room. Esther asked if she wanted help making room.

They moved the line about the fabric down and put twelve dollars where it had been. A woman watching the two of them asked if the coat had ever actually been used for work. Esther said she had owned it for eleven years before she stopped using it. The woman wanted to know why they had shown it inside out. Esther put her hand against the glass of the case and showed her where the pocket began.

Mara came with her daughter and two grandchildren. One of them fell asleep during a recording about a bread truck and woke up disappointed because he thought he was being taken somewhere to get bread. Grace came alone, in a green hat with a brim that folded up all the way around. Lorna listened to a recording twice and then complained that there was nowhere to put a crossword down while you were listening. Jo wore the trousers she had shortened. She'd done the second leg so well I had to get her to turn it up to tell which one it was.

There was a list on a clipboard by the door for people interested in a mending class. Jo went to look at it. She didn't put my name down. She told me later she'd put her own name down because she wanted to make a zip work again on a skirt she liked, and she'd got as far as cutting it out before she realized the zip was no longer the only problem.

Celia asked me if I would talk to the librarian about the class. I told her I was thinking of one Saturday morning, four people, and one item each. I said I could bring my machine but wouldn't leave it there. Celia wrote all of that down. Then she asked what I would charge.

It was the first time in years somebody had asked me what I would charge for teaching another person to do something I did all day. I asked her what they paid the woman who taught the photography class. She told me. I said I'd do it for the same amount. She said she would ask. That was a satisfactory ending to the conversation. I went and found a glass of water.

Mara caught me near the exit. Her daughter was getting the children into their jackets. We stood without talking for a little while. On the wall near us there was a small photograph of a pair of hands adjusting a buckle on an apron. I couldn't tell whose hands they were until I saw the shadow they had made on the wall of the fitting room. I knew that wall by the place where somebody had touched it with blue chalk. The hands were Mara's.

“Where'd they get that?” I asked.

“Esther took it,” Mara said. “She had a little camera. Do you remember it?”

I didn't. I had been in the room, though. I could tell because at the bottom edge of the photograph there was a set of keys on the table with a cheap brass ring I had had since high school. I leaned closer. The photograph was of Mara's hands. Whoever looked at it could see her hands without having to know anything about the keys.

XII. Saturday Morning

I spent my first free Saturday at home. I slept until a little after seven, which wasn't particularly late, but the light had already reached the bookshelf when I got up. For twenty years I had seen that light in the evening when it came from the other direction. I went to the kitchen and put a pan on the stove. While I waited for it to heat, I pulled the sewing machine out of its case and tried it on the kitchen table. The table could hold it. I would need a different chair.

The week after that, Mara and I went for the coffee we'd written down. We chose a place with tables on the sidewalk and went inside because a delivery van was idling out front. I was about to order for both of us when she asked for something I had never heard her ask for. It came with whipped cream. She ate the cream first and then tried the coffee.

“The coffee's terrible,” she said.

“Would you like mine?”

“No. The cream was good. I think I'm done.”

We had forty-five minutes before she had to get one of her grandchildren from a lesson. I thought this would mean we would talk about our parents. We did, but mostly about hers and the things I had missed. At the end her father had lived in an apartment down the hall from hers. Once he knocked on her door because he wanted help putting a clock back together. When she finished, he asked how much she charged. She told him she charged a dollar. He brought her a dollar the next morning in an envelope with her name on it, spelled correctly for the first time in several weeks. She spent it on a pear at the market. He ate half of the pear and told her it was too hard.

“I kept the envelope,” she said. “I wasn't going to keep the dollar, too.”

I told her about the last customer who had paid me in cash. He brought four coins in a little drawstring bag and wanted me to keep the bag, because he had a house full of them. I kept it. It was just the right size for holding the screwdriver that came with my machine. We were quiet a little after that. A woman at the next table had brought a book she was finding funny. Every few minutes she laughed with her mouth shut, which was a sound I knew because I had made it in all sorts of rooms where there was supposed to be no sound at all.

When Mara went to get the grandchild, she asked if I wanted to walk as far as the car. I walked with her. There was an old paper map on the passenger seat, folded down to a single street. She showed me the turn she had to make after she left the parking lot. I'd never been to that street. The next time I drove past it I remembered the map, and I was glad to have been told where somebody was going.

The class at the library was in January, on a morning cold enough for the room to smell of wet boots. Three people brought garments. A fourth brought a curtain she had cut too short. She said she knew I had asked them to bring something to wear. She had brought the curtain because she could afford to wear most of the clothes she wanted to wear and could not afford to replace a whole set of curtains. We set out the curtain on a clean table and looked at what she had left of the fabric. There was a strip wide enough to make a band, if she was willing to turn the strip sideways.

“Would it look right?” she asked.

“It would look as though you'd sewn a band across the bottom.”

She looked at the other three people, who were taking coats off and setting cups down on the windowsill. “I think I can look at that every morning,” she said.

Jo brought her skirt. We spent time finding out which side of the zip was caught and which side she had cut through. When she understood how it worked, she had an idea about how to put a different kind of zip in. I told her I hadn't tried it on that sort of cloth. She said she'd try it on a scrap first. She spent the rest of the morning at the machine, and when it was time to go she had to be asked twice to stop. She went home with a working zip and a crooked line of stitches on a piece of fabric she was reluctant to throw away.

At noon I put my machine back in the case. The woman with the curtain helped me carry it to the door. The librarian asked if I would do a second class. I told her she could ask me again in a month. She put it in her calendar.

Mara had suggested going out for lunch on the day of the class, if I still felt like talking after it. I did. We met at the bus stop near the old shop. It was a little out of the way for both of us, but we knew where it was. There had been work on the building since I'd last gone by. The upstairs windows were open an inch. In the downstairs window somebody had put a sheet of paper with a number on it. The number was for a person to call if they wanted to live there.

The door was blue. The new closer took it all the way into the frame without letting it bounce. I watched a man bring a toolbox out and hold the door for a woman carrying a folded table. Then the woman carried the table the last few feet herself.

Mara came up beside me. She was wearing a coat I'd never seen before, short and dark green, with a hood. I told her I liked the hood.

“It's going to rain later,” she said.

“We can eat inside.”

She took the braided cord out of her pocket. She'd cut off the worn end and put it on her own house key. The blue was mostly gone. I could see it if she turned the cord a certain way.

“If you ever feel like coming to my house,” she said, “give me a call. I don't work Tuesdays.”

“I don't work most days.”

“I was only offering Tuesday.”

I laughed. The bus came around the corner, full enough that I could see people standing in the aisle. We let it go by. There was a place we could walk to, if we both wanted to. Mara put her key away and asked if I minded taking the long way past the water. I said I had time. Then I asked her whether she'd rather take the bus if it came before we got to the corner. She said she'd like to walk. We picked up our bags and went together as far as the crossing.