Two months later I was making tea for a room.

And I found — this surprised me most of all — that I was good at a part of it I had never known was a part of it.

Not the sewing; Lottie still had to fix my collars.

But the other thing, the green-chair thing, the sitting-with.

I had spent a working life being a man of few words, and it turned out that in a shop like Franny’s, few words are exactly right — that a young mother worn down to the wick does not want advice or brightness, she wants a quiet man to hold her baby for ten minutes and not ask her how she’s holding up, and I could do that, I could do that all day.

Deja told me things over those Thursdays that I suspect she told no one else, small hard things about a boyfriend who’d left and a mother who wouldn’t help and the particular loneliness of being twenty-two with a baby and no soft place to set your fear down.