CHAPTER TWELVE
LARKIN
Denise called me two weeks later about a rising singer named Josie Calhoun who needed someone to help pull together a wardrobe for her first real tour, something that looked handmade and lived-in instead of stylist-perfect, and Denise had told her about the woman who'd brought a ruined beaded dress back from the dead.
"She wants vintage pieces, restyled," Denise said. "Not costumes. Real clothes with real wear in them, altered to fit her specifically. I told her you might be the only person in this town who could actually pull that off without making it look like a costume department."
I met Josie at the shop on a Tuesday afternoon, a woman about my age with a voice I'd heard once on the radio without knowing her name, and she talked with her hands the way excited people do, pulling pieces off the racks and holding them up against herself in the mirror, asking my opinion on everything.
"This is exactly what I mean," she said, holding up a worn denim jacket with a hand-embroidered collar. "I don't want to look like I stepped off a runway. I want to look like I actually lived a life before anybody was paying attention to me."
"That jacket needs the shoulders taken in and the embroidery reinforced," I said, turning it over in my hands, already seeing the work in my mind the way I used to see a melody's shape before Townes finished writing it. "But the bones are good. It'll hold."
She hired me on the spot, cash up front for the first round of alterations plus a flat fee if she liked the finished pieces enough to wear them on tour, and I left the shop that afternoon with three garment bags in my car and a feeling I hadn't had in longer than I wanted to think about, something close to pride that had nothing to do with anyone else's approval.
Word moved fast in a town this size, the same way it had moved fast about Townes pulling the Vega song, except this time the current was carrying something that belonged entirely to me.
Within a month I had two more clients, both smaller names, both willing to pay real money for work they couldn't get anywhere else, and I started thinking, seriously, about whether this could be more than a way to fill the hours while my marriage sat in limbo.
Someone at a fitting recognized my last name and asked, not unkindly, if I'd learned to sew because of Townes, if being married to a songwriter had somehow led me here, and I found myself explaining, for the first time out loud to a stranger, that I'd been altering clothes since I was fourteen years old, long before I ever met him, that this had always been mine even during the years I'd let it shrink down to almost nothing.
"It's funny," the woman said. "Everybody assumes the wife's whole life orbits around the husband's thing."
"I used to assume that myself," I said, and it surprised me how true it felt to say out loud.
She stayed to talk a little longer while I pinned the hem of her dress, curious now that I'd opened the door to the subject even slightly. "Fourteen," she said. "What got you started?"
"My grandmother taught me," I said. "She used to take in mending for half the women in her church, and I'd sit at her feet while she worked and beg her to let me try.
She said my hands were sure before I had any actual skill, which I think was her way of encouraging a kid without lying to her.
I got better because I wanted to prove her right. "
"Is she still around?"
"She passed a few years back," I said, and something tightened in my chest saying it, the same grief Townes had once folded into a song without asking, though I didn't say that part out loud.
"I think about her every time I sit down to work.
She used to say a good repair should be invisible unless you're looking for it, and a great repair should be beautiful even if you are. "
"That's lovely," the woman said. "You should put that on a card or something. For the business."
I laughed, surprised by the suggestion, and told her I'd think about it, and after she left I stood alone in the shop for a moment, turning the idea over, feeling for the first time like the business might actually deserve a name and a card and all the small, official trappings of something built to last rather than something I'd back into by accident during the worst season of my marriage.
I called my mother-in-law that week, more out of habit than anything, since Townes's mother had always been kind to me even in the stretch when her son and I weren't speaking, and she asked how I was doing, careful in the way people are careful when they know something's wrong but don't know how much detail they're allowed.
"I'm building something," I told her. "It's small right now. But it's mine."
"That matters," she said. "I raised that boy to believe his songs could say anything. I don't think I ever taught him that some things aren't his to say."
I didn't tell her the specifics, didn't need to, and she didn't ask, and something in the way she said it made me think she suspected more than she was letting on, the way mothers of complicated sons often do.
I worked late most nights that month, hunched over Ruthie's kitchen table with pins in my mouth and fabric spread across every surface, and Ruthie started teasing me about taking over her whole house with what she called my new obsession, and I let her tease me, because it felt good to have something worth teasing about that had nothing to do with grief.
Townes texted once, near the end of that month, not calling this time, just a single message. I heard you're doing alterations for Josie Calhoun's tour. That's incredible, Lark. I mean that.
I stared at the message for a long time before I decided not to answer it.
I wasn't trying to punish him. I simply didn't yet know what I wanted to say, and I had learned, finally, that not every feeling needed to be handed to somebody the moment it arrived.
Some things could sit with me first. Some things could just be mine, for a while, before they became anything shared at all.
Denise asked me about him once that month, careful, the way she asked most personal questions, sliding it in sideways while we sorted through a new batch of donated pieces. "You don't talk about him much," she said. "I don't want to pry. I just notice."
"There's a lot to sort through," I said, which was as much as I could offer honestly. "I don't think I've figured out what to do with it yet myself."
"Take your time," Denise said. "I've watched a lot of women rush the sorting-through part because everybody around them wants an answer faster than they're ready to give one. You don't owe anybody a timeline on this."
I thought about that advice more than once in the weeks that followed, especially on the evenings when missing him arrived without warning, sharp and specific, missing the particular way he used to hum under his breath while he cooked, missing the sound of his truck in the driveway at the end of a long day, missing being known by somebody who had once known me better than anyone alive.
I let myself feel all of it without acting on any of it, which was its own kind of discipline, harder than I expected, and I told myself that the discipline itself was doing something useful, even on the nights it felt like nothing but exhausting restraint.