Chapter 1 — The Lights Off

I came to the shop on a Tuesday in November to begin taking it apart, and I stood outside on the sidewalk for eleven minutes before I could make my hand turn the key.

I know it was eleven minutes because the bakery two doors down has a clock in the window, and I watched it the whole time, the way you watch anything that isn’t the thing you came to do.

The shop is small.

Franny had run it for thirty-one years — a narrow storefront on Delcorte Street with a bay window, a hand-lettered sign that read Alterations & Mending, F.

Nowak, and a bell over the door that she had refused to replace even after the clapper cracked and it went from a ring to a flat little clunk.

Inside were two sewing machines, a long cutting table worn pale down the middle, a wall of wooden thread spools in every color a person could want, and a green armchair by the radiator where customers sat while they waited and, more often, while they talked.

My wife had died in July.

It was November.

And my daughter, my accountant, and my own tired good sense had all told me the same reasonable thing, which was that a seventy-year-old man does not need to keep a mending shop he does not know how to run, and that the kind thing to do for myself was to clear it out, sell the machines, let the lease go, and close the door on that chapter gently.

I should say, so you understand the man standing on that sidewalk, that I had not been doing well.

I had been a machinist for thirty-eight years and then a retired one for six, and in retirement I had discovered that I did not have hobbies so much as I had Franny, that the shape of my days had been built entirely around a woman who left the house at nine and came home at six full of a street’s worth of small news, and that without her the days had no shape at all, just a long grey sameness from the coffee I no longer wanted to the television I no longer watched.

I had stopped calling people.

I had let the casseroles pile up in the freezer and eaten cereal standing at the counter.

Grief, for me, had not been a storm; it had been a slow leaking-out, a man going quiet and still like a house with the heat turned down room by room.

My daughter heard it in my voice on the Sunday calls, I know she did, and neither of us knew what to do about it.

So the reasonable people were not wrong to want the shop gone.

They looked at me and saw a man who needed fewer burdens, not more.