She told me to put the kettle on, because it was Thursday, and on Thursdays there was tea, and had been tea, in this shop, for as long as she could remember.

I did not know that.

Thirty-one years and I had not known that my wife made tea on Thursday afternoons for whoever was in the shop, that there was a rotation of chipped cups in the back cabinet, that half the neighborhood had passed through that green chair on a Thursday to be measured for a hem and stay an hour and leave lighter.

“She never told me any of this,” I said, and Lottie looked at me with a great and terrible kindness and said, “Gil.