Chapter 4: A Card in the Window

I didn't answer Senan.

I deleted the text, and then I turned my phone face down on my knee, because my hand wanted to throw it out the window.

"Where to?" the driver asked again.

"Dorchester," I said. "Anywhere on Dorchester Avenue."

I didn't know a soul in Dorchester.

That was the point.

He let me out at Savin Hill with two garbage bags of clothes, a toolbox and a broken sewing machine.

I had forty-one thousand dollars in an envelope down my sweater.

It was four in the afternoon on my wedding day.

I bought an iced coffee and sat on my garbage bags and drank it.

Then I started walking.

Three blocks down, there was a card in a shop window.

The shop was narrow, with gold letters on the glass that said MOYNIHAN'S TAILORING & ALTERATIONS.

The card was handwritten in black marker.

ROOM UPSTAIRS. SEAMSTRESS WANTED. NO TIME WASTERS. NO CRYING.

I went in.

A bell rang over the door.

Inside it smelled of steam and pressed wool.

There were two big industrial machines, a three-way mirror, and racks of plastic-wrapped suits up to the ceiling.

A tall woman with a bleached blonde crop and dark roots was kneeling in front of a man in a dress shirt and boxer shorts.

She had pins in her mouth.

"We're closed," she said around them.

"The sign says open."

"The sign's a liar." She looked me over. "You crying?"

"No."

"You look like you were crying."

"I'm here about the card."

She took the pins out of her mouth.

"Can you sew?"

"Yes."

"Everybody says that. Their nana taught them to sew on a button."

She stood up, grabbed a pair of navy suit trousers off the counter and threw them at me.

"This gentleman has a funeral in an hour. Those need to come up an inch and a half with a proper blind hem. I'm timing you."