The Same Wedding Dress, Two Different Brides novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Walls

I stood at the counter with the letter in my hands.

The words didn't change.

"October thirty-first," Shauna said over my shoulder. "That's Halloween. They're evicting us on Halloween."

"They're not evicting us," Gran said. "They're declining to renew. It's a different word for the same boot."

She took the letter back from me, folded it along its creases and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.

Then she went to the wall behind the front desk and lifted down a small black frame.

I had walked past it every day for ten years.

I had never once taken it off the hook.

Inside the glass was a yellow slip of paper, typed on a manual typewriter.

Received of Mrs. Furlong, one month's rent, front room and workroom, Tremont Street. September 1951.

At the bottom was a signature in faded blue ink.

Thorncroft.

"Your great-grandmother came over the bridge from Southie with one sewing machine on a handcart," Gran said. "My father pushed it. I sat on top of it. I was three."

"You rode in on the machine?"

"I rode in on the Singer. It's still in the workroom. Machine number four. The one nobody uses because it bites."

Shauna rubbed her thumb.

"It does bite."

"The building was empty," Gran said. "It had been a shoe repair. The landlord was a man called Thorncroft with a silver cane. He didn't want to rent to a woman alone. My mother made his daughter's wedding dress for free, and he gave her the lease."

"A Thorncroft daughter got married in a Furlong dress?"

"Three of them did. And two Thorncroft granddaughters. I made both of those myself." She put the frame back on its hook. "We have paid rent to that family every month for seventy-five years. We paid it the week of the blizzard in 1978, when nobody could get down Tremont Street, and my mother walked it to their office on snowshoes."

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