The Hem

On the night I told Felix Marr I was leaving, he brought me a coat with a torn hem and said it could wait until morning.

He had never brought me anything that could wait until morning.

It was nearly midnight. My shop was closed, the iron was cooling, and I had one sleeve turned inside out across my knees. Felix stood on the other side of the worktable with the dark coat over his arm and rain in his hair. He looked at the bare hook where I usually left my own coat, at the two boxes under the cutting table, and then at me.

“You’re packing,” he said.

“I’m sorting.” I put down the sleeve. “How did you tear it?”

“It caught on the workshop gate. Don’t change the subject.”

That was new. Usually I was the one who told Felix which subjects we were allowed to discuss. The broken hinge on my back door, yes. The fact that he had come to fix it before I’d asked, no. His father’s habit of bringing us both supper on Thursdays, yes. Whether his father thought there was an us, absolutely not.

I took the coat from him. At the edge of the lining, three inches of stitching had given way. His thumb had been worrying the loose thread; the cloth was warm where he held it.

“I have a placement,” I said. “Six months. Copenhagen. I leave in eight weeks.”

Felix let go of the coat, though I had not quite taken its weight. It slid onto the table between us.

“You got it,” he said.

I had told him about the application in January, while he measured the window frame in my kitchen. He’d brought it up twice since, both times to ask whether I wanted him to help with the accounts if I had to close the shop for half a year. I hadn’t told him I made the final interview. I’d wanted, foolishly, to give him the good news without handing him the departure in the same breath.

“I got it on Monday.”

By Tuesday I had worked out how to keep the shop while I was away. Another alterations maker would use the cutting table and cover half the rent. I had written to my regular clients, labelled the work I could finish before leaving, and made a list of the work I would have to turn down. I had done the part that required numbers. Every time I reached for my phone to tell Felix, I pictured him listening with that exact attention he gave a piece of wood before he cut it. Then I pictured him offering to carry the boxes.

He had listened to me talk about conservation long before the application existed. I had earned my textile-conservation qualification while keeping the shop open, but never had six months inside a specialist studio. Once, after a client told me to replace the silk lining in her mother’s coat because new silk would look cleaner, I had gone to Felix’s workshop furious enough to forget my own supper. He set down the plane in his hand and asked what would be lost if I did. I talked for twenty minutes. He did not pretend to know the answer. When I finally found it, he said, “Tell her that.”

I wanted this placement for myself. I wanted him to know what it meant. Neither wish cancelled the other, and I had treated them as though one must.

“That’s good.” He reached for the cuff of the coat and straightened it. “You’ve wanted to do that work since before you took this place.”

His being pleased hurt more than I’d expected. I had come to depend on Felix telling the truth when it was inconvenient. Tonight I wanted a selfish lie: that he would miss me enough to ask me not to go.

“You can say it’s a long time,” I said.

“It is a long time.”

“You can say it’s a long way.”

“Nina.” He stopped smoothing the cuff. “I know where Copenhagen is.”

I laughed, once, too sharply. Felix didn’t join in. Outside, a bus drew up at the stop opposite my window and let two people off. The shopfront reflected us back to ourselves: his wet shoulders, my bent head, the coat like a third person neither of us had invited.

I found a needle. Work gave my hands a sequence I trusted. Fold the lining under. Keep the edge even. Don’t pull so tightly that the cloth puckers. Felix moved around the table to turn on the lamp above my shoulder. He knew exactly how much light I wanted for a dark seam. When he stepped back, he did not touch me, though he had always been careless about that small space between us.

I missed his hand before it had been offered.

“I could finish that,” he said, watching the needle rather than my face.

“You could.” I pulled the thread through. “But you’d make the stitches too tight.”

“You could show me.”

I nearly did. Usually he would stand behind my chair, close enough to see the work, and I would tell him not to breathe on my neck while pretending I had not noticed his breath. Tonight he stayed at the far side of the lamp. The empty space was deliberate, and it seemed to have a temperature of its own.

“Another night,” I said.

He nodded, accepting the answer as though it did not cost him anything. I knew him well enough to see that it did.

“You don’t have to mend it now,” he said.

“You don’t have to stand there watching.”

“I’ve spent eleven years doing it.”

The needle paused. Felix looked as surprised by the words as I was. His face had been familiar to me for so long that I had begun to think familiarity meant I knew what he intended. I knew the slight line beside his mouth when he was tired. I knew he drank water before coffee and forgot lunch when a job had gone wrong. None of that told me why he was still here.

“Then don’t stop because I’m going,” I said.

He put one hand on the empty chair beside me, but did not sit. “Is that what you’re asking?”

The question left me nowhere to hide. I could have told him I meant the calls, the suppers, the picture he’d send whenever one of his clients chose a truly terrible colour for a kitchen. Those things were ours already. I wanted something I had no right to assume was included.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I did until you came in.”

He nodded. He could have made the answer easier by giving me one of the jokes we used when a conversation came too close. Instead he waited while I finished the seam. Twice my fingers brushed the inside of his coat, where he would be later, and I had to look at the stitches again.

When I held it up, the hem lay flat. Felix took the coat, folded it over his arm and stayed.

“I’m glad you got the placement,” he said. “I want you to go.”

“And?”

He glanced at the two boxes under the table. Then he looked at me without the habit of looking away in time.

“And I’ve been very good at wanting only what you had room to give me. I don’t think I can do that for another six months.”

The bus pulled away. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the iron ticking as it cooled.

I had a hundred questions. The first one was the least useful, and the only honest one I could manage.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Felix set the coat down. “I am telling you.”

He did not move closer. For once, neither did I.