The business adviser at the library wore a cardigan the color of oatmeal and asked Iris how many hours she wanted to work.
It was not the question she had prepared for.
“As many as I need to.”
The woman, whose name was Laura, wrote nothing down.
“How many would you like to?”
Iris looked at the papers spread between them. Costs, savings, the photographs of Mill Lane. She had expected to defend the idea, not the number of evenings she might wish to keep.
“Thirty-five?” she said. “Forty, at first.”
“Including the buying, bookwork, cleaning, fittings and answering messages?”
“I suppose not.”
Laura smiled without looking triumphant. “Let’s count them.”
For forty minutes they turned a room with sunlight into a collection of ordinary tasks. None was beyond Iris. Together, they occupied more time than she had allowed.
Then they discussed customers. The people who already asked her to shorten trousers. How many actually paid rather than bringing wine or promising a favor. How often the work arrived. What she would need to charge to make it worth opening the door.
“I don’t want to be expensive,” Iris said.
“Compared with what?”
“A new pair of trousers.”
“Then some trousers won’t be worth altering. You’re selling the work, not trying to persuade every garment to deserve it.”
Iris looked at her notebook.
She had been doing exactly that. Trying to create a business where no one was disappointed, no customer turned away because the repair cost more than the thing. A department store squeezed into one woman’s hours, with nobody else to cover lunch.
Laura helped her separate the idea into two stages. Alterations first, on appointments, with a limited rail of pieces Iris owned and could price honestly. Expansion only after she knew what sold. A reserve for living costs kept separate from equipment money. No estimate based on the money from a house that had not yet been sold.
“I haven’t told you not to do it,” Laura said as they finished.
“I know. You’ve told me what doing it might involve.”
“That’s the service.”
Iris gathered her papers. She felt tired, chastened and oddly more capable than when she’d arrived.
Outside the library, her phone rang.
Gail Denton. Their daughters had shared a bus stop for years. Iris had altered a school-play costume for Gail once, shortened two curtains and been given wine both times. Gail had always remembered the favors, if not quite how long they took.
“I heard you might be sewing,” she said. “Properly, I mean. On your own.”
“I hope to.”
“Then I’ve got your first order.”
Iris stopped beneath the library noticeboard. The words reached her before the details, a little flame of relief. Work. Someone who would come without an advertisement or a beautiful room to persuade them.
Gail’s older daughter was marrying eight days after the store closed, the Saturday of Iris’s hoped-for first week working for herself. Four bridesmaid dresses had arrived from an online shop, each several inches too long. The colors were lovely, Gail said. The lengths were unreasonable. Her niece had offered to do them, but Iris was better at this sort of thing.
“Could you fit them in? Just the hems.”
“I’d need to see them. Are they lined?”
“I think so. It’s all one dress.”
“Sometimes it’s two skirts, one inside the other.”
“Oh. Well, you would know.”
Iris took out the notebook Laura had helped her fill. She could see the labor estimate on the open page, written in her own hand. Numbers were much easier to believe when nobody she knew was waiting for her to say them.
“A straightforward hem would start at thirty-five per dress. If there’s lining or difficult fabric, more. I couldn’t give you a final price until the fitting.”
There was a pause.
“Per dress?”
“Yes.”
“I was thinking sixty for all four.”
Iris looked down at the sidewalk. She could do a favor. She had done plenty. She could also see how quickly a business might be made entirely of people she felt bad charging.
“That wouldn’t cover the time,” she said.
“They weren’t expensive dresses.”
“I understand.”
“So it seems a lot to spend putting them right.”
“It might be. I can’t make that decision for you.”
She disliked the stiffness in her own voice. Gail was not trying to cheat her. Weddings had a way of making every small purchase sound essential until a person looked at the total and began searching for something that could stop costing money.
“I’d like to help,” Iris said, more gently. “But I can’t promise a price for work I haven’t seen. Or a date, until I know what each one needs.”
“I thought a hem was a hem.”
“Sometimes.”
“And you did Sophie’s costume so quickly.”
“That was a straight cotton skirt. I could use the machine all the way around.”
She almost offered twenty-five. The sum rose automatically, a more agreeable number for both women to stand beside. Four times twenty-five was a hundred dollars she didn’t yet have. She imagined Gail saying yes and the pleasant relief of putting a client’s name into an empty book.
Then she looked at her estimate again. A hundred dollars would not shorten the hours.
“If your niece wants to look at them first, that may make more sense for you,” she said.
Gail exhaled. “I think we’ll have to. I wasn’t expecting it to be that much.”
“I know.”
“No hard feelings.”
“Of course.”
After they hung up, Iris stood with the notebook open. No hard feelings was more complicated than it sounded. She felt several, none large enough to justify a complaint, all unpleasantly close to shame.
She had lost an order before owning a room to lose it in.
For a minute she wanted to call back. Say she’d found a way, an introductory price, some phrase that would turn discomfort into good service. Instead she closed the notebook without entering Gail’s name and put it in her bag.
At Mill Lane, the florist’s old door was open. Two people stood inside with Tess, one pointing at the long white wall where Iris had imagined the rail. She stopped across the street.
It was an unreasonable thing to feel robbed by strangers inspecting a room she had not rented. She felt it anyway.
Tess saw her and came to the doorway.
“Did you want to come in?”
“No. I have to get back.”
“I sent the smaller unit.”
“I’ve got it. Could I see it tomorrow?”
“Ten?”
“Ten.”
The woman inside laughed at something her companion said. Iris walked away before she could begin disliking her.
At the store, she found Daniel arguing with a floor lamp.
Not speaking to it. Worse. He had acquired a small screwdriver and the expression of a man unwilling to lose a contest with an object.
“Does it require permission?” she asked.
“The fitting’s loose.”
“Is it yours?”
“It’s on the fixture list.”
“Was it listed as working?”
“No.”
“Then you might be winning an argument nobody started.”
He looked up. “That’s an excellent description of my morning.”
She laughed and set her bag down.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“Useful.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It wasn’t. Just less picturesque than the room.”
He put the screwdriver down. “Lunch?”
“I’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Then I won’t describe the lamp.”
They went to the park with sandwiches. This time Iris had remembered to buy them. She chose egg salad for herself, chicken for him, and a pastry to share because Laura had not included every good thing in the business plan.
She told him what she’d learned. He asked questions rather than revising it. Once she caught him opening his mouth to offer a solution and raised an eyebrow. He closed it again, smiling.
“You can speak,” she said. “I’m not training a dog.”
“Good. I would be a difficult dog.”
“Very particular about the route.”
“And the sticks.”
She laughed. Then, without quite planning to, she leaned across the small space between them and kissed him.
He went still for a fraction of a second, surprised. Then his hand came to her cheek, warm and familiar, and he kissed her back.
Across the path, Thomas Wren continued to disapprove of the parking meters.
When she sat back, Daniel was smiling in a way she hadn’t seen before. Not controlled. Not offering anything. Simply pleased.
“What was that for?”
“I wanted to.”
“Excellent reason.”
She gave him his half of the pastry.
The next morning, Tess showed her the windowless room behind the pharmacy.
It was clean. The lighting was adequate. She could have rented it without risking everything, and she made herself imagine the machine in one corner, a mirror behind the door, customers taking off coats in the little shared hallway.
It wasn’t impossible.
She hated it.
Tess watched her look around.
“You don’t have to be polite about a room.”
“I know. It’s sensible.”
“That’s not the same as liking it.”
“No.”
“There is one other. I didn’t send it because it’s upstairs.”
“How many?”
“One flight. Over a barber on Mason Street. The owner uses the back room for storage. Front room’s empty.”
Iris hesitated. Not accessible to everyone. Not visible from a main shopping street. Already compromises, before she had seen a wall.
“Can we look?”
They walked three blocks. The barber’s sign had a painted pole rather than an illuminated one. Through the window Iris saw two men debating something while a third attempted to cut hair around the conversation.
A narrow door at the side led to a clean staircase. Upstairs, the room had a broad sash window, pale walls and a floor that sloped almost imperceptibly toward the street. Not large. Enough for a machine, a cutting surface that could fold, a few clothes and a chair where a customer could sit without moving everything else.
The window faced a tree.
That was the first thing Iris noticed. In a few weeks, the leaves would fill it with green.
“Six hundred and fifty, heat included,” Tess said. “Six-month term to start. Owner would want references and a conversation about the use. It was an accountant’s office.”
Iris walked to the window. Downstairs, someone laughed. A bicycle bell sounded in the street.
“Can I take photographs?”
“Of course.”
She took three. The window, the floor, the stairway. Then she lowered the phone and looked again without it.
It wasn’t Mill Lane. It would not become Mill Lane if she painted it or bought nicer furniture. There was no street-level display, no beautiful wall long enough for all the clothes she wanted to rescue.
It was a room in which she could begin working.
“When would they need an answer?” she asked.
“I can arrange a meeting next week.”
“Please do.”
At the store, Priya had left a draft poster on Iris’s desk for the proposed evening. REMEMBER WHAT YOU WORE, it said, above a photograph of Hargreaves in its first year. Underneath were spaces for the date and booking details, still blank pending approval.
Iris stood looking at it.
The department store had supplied the shape of her working life so completely that even her escape had looked like a smaller version of it. Rows of clothes. A window. Somewhere people could arrive without warning and ask her to be useful.
Perhaps she wanted some of that. Perhaps she didn’t want all of it again.
Her phone buzzed. Daniel.
How was the sensible room?
She sent him the photograph with the tree.
Found another.
His answer came almost immediately.
I’d like to see that one.
So would I, she wrote.
Then, after a moment, she added: Again.