The needle went in and out of her mouth three times before she was satisfied with the thread length. She held the sleeve up to the window - the one above the sink, where the light came in yellow and specific - and turned it slow, the way she turned fruit at the market. The lining had gone thin at the crease, a pale stripe worn through from a thousand times of bending an elbow. She didn't say anything about it. The coat hung over the chair back with its arms loose, like it was waiting for something to happen to it.
The box smelled like cedar and something older than cedar - and the coat was on top, folded with the lining out. I pressed my thumb along the left cuff where the stitches ran uneven, each one a slightly different length, some of them barely a thread's width apart and some nearly a quarter inch, the whole line of them wandering like a road someone built without a map. The wool was thick enough that I couldn't feel the thread itself - only the small raised ridges, eight of them, maybe nine. I counted twice. I put the coat in the donation pile and then I took it back out and put it on the bed, and then I wore it home on the train with my arms crossed against the cold, one hand covering the cuff.
The tailor held the cuff under his lamp the way a dentist holds a tooth - and he said eighty-five without looking up. My phone buzzed on the glass counter. The photo on the screen was gray wool, wooden buttons, the same notched lapel, forty dollars and free shipping. I looked at the coat and then at the phone and then at the coat again, and the tailor was already writing something down on a yellow slip.
The Coat That Kept Coming Apart
The thread kept catching on itself and I'd have to hold the whole thing up to the overhead light - turning it, looking for where I'd gone wrong, and by the time I found it my arm was tired. I unpicked the stitches with a seam ripper I found in a drawer I hadn't opened since moving in. The second attempt pulled the lining puckered and strange, like a mouth after dental work, and I cut those out too. At some point the light through the window shifted from white to orange and I hadn't eaten anything since morning and there were twelve inches of thread curled on the table beside my mug and maybe three stitches I'd decided to keep. I ran my thumbnail along the original repair - following it where it wandered, and realized I'd been doing that for several minutes without noticing I'd stopped sewing.
Her mother set the cup on the counter without looking for a coaster, which she always looked for. The finger moved slow along the cuff, across the new stitches first, then back along the old ones - the ones that wandered, and she stopped at the place where my thread met hers and pressed there a little, the way you press a bruise to see if it still is one. The refrigerator clicked on. Outside, a car door shut twice, the second time harder. Her hand stayed on the seam.
The coat goes on the hook nearest the door - not the closet, where it would disappear behind other things. The spool sits on the shelf above it, camel-colored, with maybe a yard left wound around the plastic, maybe less. I meant to put it back in the drawer with the seam ripper and the measuring tape and the rest of the things I almost never use. Every time I reach for my keys I see it there. I've stopped seeing it as something in the wrong place.
The left pocket has a hole - small enough that only a pen would find it, and a pen did, last Tuesday, somewhere between the subway and the office, gone before I noticed anything was missing. I put two fingers in and felt the edges of the tear - the wool fraying outward in a thin halo, and stood there in the coat still on, keys in one hand, the overhead light not yet on. The spool was on the shelf. I looked at it for a long time before I took my coat off.
What the Needle Found
The needle I used last time was still threaded, the tail of camel thread dry and stiff - and I had to wet it between my lips before it would move right through the wool. The hole was smaller than I remembered, or the fraying had settled back into itself in the week it had been ignored. I sat on the floor under the overhead light with the coat across my lap, and I noticed for the first time that the right pocket had been mended before, by someone else, the stitches tight and even and a shade darker than the wool - a color that must have matched once. I held both pockets open at the same time and looked at them side by side the way she held the sleeve to the window, turning slightly, for no reason except to see. There was nothing to compare them against except each other, and I compared them for a long time.
The thread ran out three stitches from the end and I had to cut a new length from the spool, and the new thread was the same color but not quite - brighter by half a shade, the way a paint chip looks different on the wall than it did in the store. I finished the pocket with it anyway. Now there's a seam that changes color at the corner, a line you'd only see if you were looking, and I've looked at it every morning this week while waiting for the kettle, the coat on the hook - my coffee not yet made. I don't know whose stitches are whose anymore, at the right pocket - the dark even ones from before me, and the camel ones from November, and now these, slightly off - slightly brighter, ending where I ran out of what I had. I put my hand in and felt nothing but wool and the small ridge of all three repairs running together under my thumb, and I left for work without fixing my hair.
The jacket had been in the back of the closet for two winters, one sleeve turned inside out the way a jacket gets when someone takes it off fast and doesn't care. I pulled it out because the morning was colder than expected and found a button missing from the second buttonhole, the thread still there in a small frayed knot - holding nothing. I laid it flat on the bed and looked at the other buttons - four of them, amber, slightly domed - and then I went to the tin on the windowsill where I keep the odd ones, and I turned the tin over on the bedspread and looked for twenty minutes at buttons I've no memory of saving. None of them matched, and I put the jacket on anyway with the second buttonhole open - and on the train I noticed a man reading a folded newspaper the same way I noticed the tin - slowly, like the thing in his hands was asking something of him. The jacket smelled, faintly, like the cedar and the thing older than cedar, and I kept the collar up the whole ride in.
Disclaimer
This article is for general informational purposes only and doesn't constitute professional - financial, medical, or legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your specific situation.
