I did not take over Franny’s shop.

Franny’s shop took over me — reached out through a basket of unfinished work and a boy’s missing button and a young mother who needed two hands, and it mended me, stitch by stitch, back into the middle of a life I had been sitting at the edge of even before she died.

She used to say, when a customer fretted that a thing was too far gone, that almost nothing is.

That the trick is only to stop throwing torn things away.

That most of what a life asks of you, in the end, is a needle, a good light, and the patience to sit with what is broken until you learn the way it wants to be held together — and then to hold it there, and hold it there, and make it last.

She was talking about coats.

I know now she was talking about all of it.

And so I keep the lights on, and I keep the kettle going, and I keep the door unlocked on Delcorte Street, and I do the only work I have ever found that does not run out no matter how much of it you do, which is the small, unglamorous, unfinishable, holy work of repair.

THE END.