The first thing Iris did in her own workroom was discover that the key turned in the opposite direction from the one she expected.
She tried it twice, looked at the number on the door, then turned it left.
Inside, the room smelled of clean wood and fresh air. Saul had opened the window. The tree outside moved softly in the morning light, its leaves nearly filling the lower half of the glass.
For a moment she stood on the threshold without bringing anything in.
Then Hugh called from the stairs.
“If you’re admiring it, could you admire the bit where I put this down?”
She stepped aside, laughing. He came in with the machine, followed by his brother-in-law carrying the folded worktable. She had paid them for the van and time rather than treating retirement from one job as permission to begin another unpaid one.
The chair arrived next. Blue, firm, slightly too large until Iris moved the little side table she’d brought from home. Then it fitted.
Winnie came at eleven with a plant and a warning that she did not intend to water it for her.
“Very fair.”
“It’s difficult to kill. That isn’t a challenge.”
They arranged the screen, tested the mirror position and argued about the height of the coat hooks. Iris won two of the three arguments and discovered she preferred being allowed the third to being right about everything.
By two, the room had become workable.
Not finished. There were boxes beneath the table, a bare patch on the wall where the shelf would go and a trailing cable she secured properly before someone tripped over it. But the machine ran, the iron heated and the light was as good as she remembered.
She ate a sandwich sitting in the blue chair, alone.
Downstairs, the barber’s clippers began and stopped. A car door closed in the street. Somewhere a man laughed with such conviction that she could hear the answer without hearing the joke.
Iris put her feet flat on the floor and took another bite.
In the afternoon she unpacked the service bell. It looked absurdly important on the small table near the door. She rang it once, softly, then moved it out of the place where a nervous client might hit it while taking off a coat.
The first appointment was at nine-thirty Tuesday.
She arrived at eight, though the walk from home had taken less time than she’d allowed and she still had a house full of boxes. She checked the iron, the machine, the mirror, the appointment book. She changed the position of the chair and changed it back.
At nine-twenty-six, Philip Mercer knocked.
“I hope I’m not early.”
“Four minutes. An entirely manageable emergency.”
He smiled and came in carrying his jacket over one arm. Not Arthur’s suit. His own, dark gray, a little worn at the cuffs and clearly a garment he had been comfortable in before it began to disagree with him.
Iris offered the chair. He sat, looked around and nodded.
“Good light.”
“Yes.”
“Arthur would have liked the tree.”
“So do I.”
That was all they said about Arthur. Philip wanted the jacket for a graduation, then lunch with his daughter and grandson. A day requiring movement, sitting, photographs and the ability to reach across a table without feeling stitched into his own clothes.
Iris asked him to put it on.
He stood before the mirror and immediately held his breath.
“You can breathe,” she said.
“I was trying to help.”
“It makes the fitting rather optimistic.”
He exhaled. They both laughed.
She checked the seams, the available cloth, how the jacket moved when he lifted his arms. There was enough allowance for a useful adjustment, not enough for a transformation she would be foolish to promise. She explained what she could do, what it would cost and when he could collect it.
“Forty-five dollars,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
She waited while he considered the price.
“Thursday?” he asked.
“After two.”
“Excellent.”
He took off the jacket and handed it to her. She wrote the ticket, gave him his copy and put the garment on the rail behind the screen.
There it was. A piece of work someone had agreed to pay her to do.
After he left, she stood beside it for a moment, then sat at the machine.
At eleven, Mrs. Morrow arrived with two pairs of trousers and an opinion about the stairs.
“Quite respectable,” she said. “I’ve climbed worse for less.”
Iris laughed and moved the screen into place.
The trousers had been bought in different shops and appeared to assume two different leg lengths for the same stated size. Mrs. Morrow stood patiently while Iris measured, marked and checked the shoes she intended to wear.
“Do I look shorter in these?” the woman asked, looking down.
“Only until Thursday.”
“That’s an encouraging timescale.”
They agreed eighteen dollars a pair and a collection time. Mrs. Morrow wrote it in a small notebook rather than trusting her phone, which she said had developed preferences of its own.
When she had gone, the room contained three garments, two tickets and a little more purpose than it had an hour earlier.
At lunch, Iris called the rental landlord to confirm that her references had arrived. They had. The apartment would be held subject to the agreed paperwork and deposit. The house sale was proceeding through inspections, not complete, and she arranged the dates with enough overlap that she would not have to trust two sets of strangers to move at precisely the same speed.
Then she called Beth.
“Two customers,” she said.
“Both paid?”
“They will when they collect.”
“Both agreed to pay?”
“Yes.”
“Then two customers.”
Iris smiled at the window. “Yes.”
At half past one, Gail Denton appeared on the landing with four dresses and her younger daughter.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “We were passing.”
The garment bags filled both her arms. Beside her, Nora held a pair of silver shoes and looked as if she would have preferred to arrive by appointment.
“Come in,” Iris said. “One at a time. Mind the rail.”
They negotiated the door, the screen and each other. The dresses were pale blue, long-skirted, the sort of thing that looked light until a person tried lifting four at once. Gail hung three on the hook; Nora kept hers.
“The wedding,” Gail said, though Iris remembered. “Saturday. My niece had a go, but she didn’t like the fabric.”
Nora unzipped her cover. One side of the hem had been cut higher than the other. Underneath, a separate lining hung untouched.
Iris put the dress on the table and spread the layers carefully.
“She stopped,” Nora said. “As soon as she realized. Nobody’s blaming her.”
“I didn’t say we were,” Gail replied.
Iris examined the cut edge. Enough length remained to level it, if the wearer was happy with where it would finish. Fine cloth, slippery, no room for the sort of speed that looked efficient until the light caught a puckered seam.
“Put it on with the shoes,” she told Nora. “We’ll see what we’ve got.”
Behind the screen, the zip moved. Gail stood by the window, looking at Philip’s jacket and the two pairs of trousers.
“It’s a nice little place,” she said. “Not too much to fill up.”
“Enough for me.”
Nora emerged holding the skirt clear of her ankles. She was twenty-two, pretty and tired, with a tendency to hunch as if apologizing for needing to occupy the mirror.
Iris lowered the skirt, asked her to stand normally and marked a level just above the highest cut. It showed the shoes.
“That’s all right,” Nora said. “I like seeing them.”
“It’ll work,” Iris agreed.
Gail let out a breath. “Oh, thank goodness. And you can do the other three the same?”
“I can look at them. The women need to be here for their own fittings.”
“They can come tonight.”
Iris thought of seven o’clock. Daniel. The chair by the window, the conversation she’d spent ten days wanting and fearing. Her first response was relief that here was a task capable of filling those hours instead.
She made herself look at the dress again.
“Not tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Gail, I haven’t said I can finish all four.”
Nora looked between them. Gail’s face tightened.
“You said you’d help.”
“I said I’d need to see them before I could give you a price or promise a date.”
“I know. I’m just asking now you’ve seen.”
Iris took out a plain ticket. The work existed in separate parts: undo what needed undoing, level the outer skirt, finish it without twisting, shorten the lining, check both together, fit again. She could make herself do it late at night. Four times. She could shift her opening preparations, rush the jacket, call Mrs. Morrow and ask whether Thursday mattered quite as much as a wedding.
And if one seam went wrong, there would be nowhere left to put the mistake.
“This one is seventy-five dollars,” she said. “That includes putting the cut edge right and doing both layers. I can have it ready Friday at noon. I can’t commit to all four by then.”
Gail stared at her.
“You said thirty-five.”
“For a straightforward hem. I said lining and difficult fabric would be more.”
“The whole dress cost fifty-eight.”
Nora looked down at it, her mouth set.
“I know that’s frustrating,” Iris said. “The repair isn’t less work because the dress was inexpensive.”
She heard herself becoming formal again. She tried to soften her voice without changing the sum.
“I wish the two numbers matched better. They don’t.”
Gail looked at the rail.
“Could those people collect Saturday instead? You aren’t full here yet.”
The observation found the exact tender place. Iris had spent lunch counting two clients as if saying the number firmly made a business. There was space in the book, space in the room. There was also work on the rail she’d already promised, and a whole week she’d begun arranging around it.
“Those dates are agreed,” she said.
“But are they urgent?”
“They don’t have to be emergencies.”
For a moment nobody moved. Iris could hear a man laughing downstairs, a clipper stopping, the faint clatter of a comb on the counter.
“I told Sophie we’d found someone,” Gail said.
Nora touched the skirt at her hip.
“Then tell her what we’ve found. Iris can do mine.”
“And the others?”
“We’ll find out. They haven’t been cut. Maybe Aunt Helen can help Julie with the easy ones.”
Gail shut her eyes for a second. When she opened them, the anxiety showed more plainly than the irritation.
“I can’t keep telling people something else needs money.”
Iris understood. The understanding almost turned itself into an offer before she could stop it.
Nora spoke first.
“I’ve got the seventy-five. It’s my dress.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“I was going to spend it on a bag. I’ll borrow yours.”
They looked at each other, mother and daughter, each trying to spare the other a different embarrassment.
Iris waited.
Finally Gail nodded.
“One, then.”
Iris wrote the price and collection time. Nora read the ticket, asked whether she could sit in the dress without straining the hem, and smiled when Iris showed her how it would fall.
At the door Gail paused beside the three untouched covers.
“I could have sent you a lot of people. After the wedding.”
“I’d be glad to see them,” Iris said. “But I couldn’t do their work well if I began by promising something I can’t finish.”
Gail looked as if that was not the answer she’d wanted. She took the bags downstairs. Nora stayed long enough to say thank you, then followed her mother.
The room was suddenly large enough again.
Iris stood beside the table, looking at the single dress. She could still call them back. Three more jobs, at least another hundred and fifty dollars, perhaps the start of a useful chain of recommendations. Nobody would know she’d moved her own evening to make room.
She sat in the blue chair instead.
Her hands were shaking. Having a price had not made saying it pleasant. Having a limit had not made the person outside it grateful.
After a minute she got up, put Nora’s ticket on the cover and wrote the actual work into Thursday’s remaining space. Philip’s jacket came first. His date was Thursday too.
She worked through the afternoon, concentrating hard enough that the hours moved without asking her to watch them. The jacket needed more care than she’d expected around the lining. She allowed the time rather than pretending it should be easy because she wanted the business to begin smoothly.
At six, she stopped.
The room was orderly enough for tomorrow. The trousers were pinned, Philip’s jacket ready for the final seam. She put the iron somewhere safe, switched it off at the wall and checked the appointments once more.
At seven, Daniel would come.
For the first time all day, she did not know which tools she needed.