It only looks that way from outside, and the looking-that-way is a kind of loneliness we’ve all agreed to pretend is the truth.

What the shop taught me, finishing a dead woman’s last commission with the living people she’d gathered, was that the opposite is true — that a life, like a wedding dress, is a thing many hands make together, and that the tragedy is not needing the other hands but believing, as I had believed for seventy years, that a real man does it all himself.

Miss Reyes put it on in the back and came out and turned in front of the long mirror where Yusuf had once found his shoulders sitting right, and the whole shop went quiet, and then Lottie started to cry, and then we all did, standing in a mending shop on Delcorte Street on a Thursday afternoon, crying over a stranger’s wedding dress, because it had been the last thing in Franny’s basket with a for April on it, and now April had come and the dress was done, and my wife had — in a way I cannot explain to anyone who has not lost someone and then gone on doing their work — been present at its finishing.

Miss Reyes did not know any of that.