I could stand at a cutting table and listen, in my few-words way, while he worked out aloud whether he was smart enough for the thing he wanted, and I could say, when he was done, only you are, and mean it so plainly that he believed me.

I think, looking back, that Yusuf needed the shop as much as Deja did, as much as I did, and that Franny had known it long before I came along — that her notes about his hems going up and down were also notes about a boy she was quietly keeping an eye on, making sure he was fed and clothed and seen.

She had been growing him, the way you grow anything, with attention.

And when she died the growing did not have to stop, because she had left the boy a shop and the shop a boy, and all I had to do was not get in the way of what she’d started.