CHAPTER ELEVEN
LARKIN
Ifound the shop by accident, the way I found most good things that week, which was by not looking very hard for anything at all.
I'd been driving with no real destination that afternoon, the way I'd started doing more often since arriving at Ruthie's, needing motion more than a purpose, and I found myself following a road I hadn't taken in years, one that ran through a part of East Nashville that had changed almost entirely since I'd last paid it any attention.
Whole blocks I remembered as quiet and unremarkable had filled in with small businesses, coffee shops and record stores and a bakery with a line out the door, and something about the unfamiliar liveliness of it pulled me over to park before I'd consciously decided to stop anywhere at all.
"You sew," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I used to do a lot of alterations," I said. "For friends, mostly. Musicians, sometimes, back when Townes was still playing open mics and everybody borrowed everybody's clothes for gigs."
"Townes," Denise repeated, and something in her face flickered with recognition before she was polite enough to let it go, and I appreciated that more than she probably knew.
"I've been thinking about doing more of it," I said, surprising myself with how easily it came out, like the thought had been sitting ready inside me for longer than I'd noticed. "Not just alterations. Restoring pieces. Finding things that are almost right and making them exactly right."
"I've got a rack of things in the back that need exactly that kind of attention," Denise said. "Half of it's been sitting there for a year because I don't have the hands for it and none of my part-timers know a French seam from a straight one."
She showed me the rack, a jumble of half-ruined treasures, a beaded 1920s dress with a torn hem, a man's tuxedo jacket from the fifties that needed the lining completely rebuilt, a stack of scarves with loose threads that could have been beautiful again with an hour of patient work each.
I stood there running my hands over fabric that had survived decades before I was born, and I felt something loosen in my chest that had been clenched tight for longer than the last week.
"I could take a few pieces home," I said. "See what I can do with them. No charge, until you see the work and decide if it's worth paying for."
Denise looked at me for a moment, sizing something up. "You don't need the money," she said. It wasn't unkind, just observant.
"No," I said. "I need something that's mine."
She nodded like that answer satisfied something in her, and she wrapped up three pieces for me to take, the beaded dress and two scarves, and told me to come back whenever I had them ready, no rush, no deadline, which was exactly the opposite of everything my life had felt like for months.
I worked on the beaded dress that night at Ruthie's kitchen table, after she'd gone to bed, hand-stitching the torn hem by lamplight with a patience I hadn't known I still had in me.
Every bead I secured back into place felt like a small, private accomplishment that belonged to nobody but me.
Nobody was going to write a song about this.
Nobody was going to stand at a party and tell me how brave it was, how honest, how devastating.
It was just careful work, done well, for its own sake.
Townes called twice that week. I let both calls go to voicemail.
It wasn't cruelty. I genuinely didn't have anything to say to him yet that wasn't already said, and I didn't want to have the same conversation in a loop, him explaining, me explaining why the explanation wasn't enough, both of us circling the same drain.
I finished the beaded dress on Thursday and brought it back to Denise, and she held it up to the light and turned it slowly, checking every seam, and when she looked at me there was real respect in her face.
"This is better than the woman I paid for alterations for six years before she moved to Memphis," Denise said. "You want a job, or do you just want the rack?"
"I don't know yet," I said honestly. "I've never done this as a job. I've done it as a favor, or a hobby, or something I did because I loved somebody who needed it."
"Do this one as something you do because you love it," Denise said. "See how that feels different."
I took the tuxedo jacket home that night, and I thought about her words the whole drive back to Ruthie's, turning them over, and I understood, somewhere on that drive, that I had spent six years of my marriage loving Townes through my usefulness to him, through the books I did for him before he could afford an accountant, through the meals I made and the encouragement I gave and the vulnerable things I told him that ended up, eventually, belonging more to his career than to us.
I had never once, in all those years, done something purely because it was mine.
I started the tuxedo jacket that same night, and for the first time in longer than I wanted to count, I fell asleep thinking about seams and linings instead of songs.
The jacket took the better part of two weeks, longer than I expected, because the lining had rotted through in places I couldn't see until I'd already removed the old one, and I had to rebuild it almost entirely by hand, working out the pattern from what remained of the original construction, matching a silk close enough to the original that Denise wouldn't be able to tell where the old fabric ended and the new began.
There was something meditative in the precision of it, a kind of quiet I hadn't found anywhere else in the last month.
When I sewed, my mind couldn't wander to Townes, or the song, or the eleven years of marriage I was trying to figure out whether I still wanted, because the work demanded a different kind of attention entirely, narrow and total, the exact opposite of the sprawling, unanswerable questions I carried with me the rest of the day.
Ruthie watched me work most evenings, sometimes reading beside me at the table, sometimes just keeping me company without saying much, and one night she asked, carefully, whether I'd talked to Townes at all that week.
"He texted," I said. "I haven't answered most of it."
"Do you want to?"
"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truest answer I had. "Some days I want to call him and scream at him for another hour. Some days I miss him so much it's hard to breathe. I don't trust either feeling enough yet to act on it."
"That sounds like the right instinct," Ruthie said. "Not acting on either one yet."
I finished the jacket on a Thursday night, sometime past midnight, and I tried it on myself in Ruthie's hallway mirror even though it was cut for a man twice my size, just to see the finished lines of it, the lapels sitting exactly the way they should, the lining hidden and perfect where nobody but me would ever know how much work had gone into rebuilding what had nearly been lost. I stood there in the oversized jacket, laughing quietly at my own reflection, and it was the first time I had laughed, really laughed, in longer than I wanted to admit.