The woman on the fitting step wanted to be able to raise both arms above her head without looking as though she had raised both arms above her head.
“It’s for a photograph,” she explained.
“What happens in the photograph?”
“I throw my hat.”
Coralie looked at the jacket, then at the hat on the chair. It was a large hat. Throwing it would require commitment.
“Could we try the movement?”
The woman raised her arms. The jacket rose with them, revealing a perfectly ordinary strip of blouse.
“There,” she said. “You see?”
“Yes.”
“Can you stop it doing that?”
“Not entirely. Your shoulders move.”
The woman looked disappointed in her shoulders.
Coralie made a small adjustment and asked her to try again. It helped a little. The woman practiced three imaginary throws, then picked up the actual hat and sent it into the light fitting.
They both stared upward.
“Oh,” the woman said.
The hat hung by one ribbon, gently turning.
Coralie got the step stool. By the time she had rescued it, they were both laughing, and the woman had accepted that a blouse appearing in a photograph might not be a disaster.
When she left, Coralie found a feather on the floor and put it on the counter. Her phone lit beside it.
Stellan: Would you have dinner with me on Thursday? Or a walk first, if you’d rather. I mean as a date. I’m making a mess of this message.
She read it standing up. Then she sat down and read it again.
The pleasure was immediate and embarrassingly physical. It began somewhere beneath her ribs and spread before she could decide whether she approved of it.
She typed Yes, then deleted it. Typed I’d like that, then deleted that too.
Thursday was May eighteenth. Nineteen days after Gareth had left. Was that a number people used to judge things? Was there some respectable interval she ought to know about, like drying time between coats of paint?
She put the phone down and picked up the feather.
Ten minutes later she was still holding it.
She sent, Can I call you when I close?
His reply came quickly. Of course.
It was a reasonable response. She managed to worry about it anyway.
At lunch she returned Lenore’s casserole dish. Her aunt lived twelve minutes away, in a house where every chair had a cushion Coralie was expected not to put on the floor.
“It’s clean,” Coralie said, handing over the container.
“I assumed you hadn’t brought the food back.”
Lenore had been trying to open a jar. She set it down before Coralie could offer to help, then reconsidered and pushed it toward her.
“Since you’re here.”
Coralie opened it without comment. That was the arrangement they had gradually learned: no applause, no sympathy, no pretending her aunt had merely been waiting for the right tool.
They sat at the kitchen table while Lenore put together lunch. Coralie had not intended to stay, but leaving without eating would turn the visit into a discussion of whether she was eating, which was worse.
“You look less tired,” Lenore said.
“I slept.”
“Good.”
“Stellan asked me on a date.”
Her aunt stopped with the knife over the bread.
“The father?”
“Yes.”
“How old is he?”
“Forty-four.”
“How do you know?”
“He told me.”
“When?”
“During a conversation, which is generally how these things happen.”
Lenore set down the knife. Coralie had not meant to sound defensive so early.
“I haven’t said yes.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
Her aunt sat opposite her. For a moment she looked older than sixty-six, not because of her face but because of the care with which she lowered herself into the chair.
“I worry you’ll be grateful for too little.”
Coralie looked at the jar between them.
“He hasn’t done anything grand. We went to the market. We talked.”
“Sometimes that’s enough to feel grand when someone has been unkind.”
“Gareth wasn’t unkind every day.”
“I didn’t say he was.”
That was the difficulty. Coralie could hear the warning without being able to dismiss it, and she resented Lenore for making a sensible point at the exact moment she wanted permission to be foolish.
“I’m not asking him to marry me.”
“No. But he’s been married. He’s had a life you’re going to have to stand beside.”
“So have I.”
Lenore’s face softened. “Yes.”
The agreement startled her into silence.
Her aunt reached for the bread again, then stopped. “I had a friend who dated a widower. She spent three years being compared to somebody who couldn’t possibly disappoint anyone again.”
“Has Stellan compared me to his wife?”
“How would I know?”
“He hasn’t.”
“Then perhaps he’s different.”
It wasn’t wholehearted approval, but Coralie realized she had never actually asked for that. She ate a piece of bread, annoyed by how hungry she was.
“He makes me laugh.”
“That’s useful.”
“I like looking at him.”
Lenore lifted an eyebrow. “Also useful.”
Coralie laughed, and the tightness in the room eased a little.
“I don’t know whether I’m ready.”
“Then ask him what he’s asking for.”
“A date.”
“Ask anyway. You might discover you’re arguing with something he hasn’t said.”
Coralie could have accused her aunt of doing exactly that, but she was too tired of winning small arguments. She helped clear the plates, left the jar within easy reach and returned to work with no more certainty than she had arrived with.
The rest of the afternoon was busy enough to be merciful. Coralie finished the jacket, answered a question about Bryony’s Saturday fitting and tried her teaching project against a timer. It took longer than it should because she kept doing the difficult parts automatically and then having to reconstruct how a beginner would approach them.
At four she accidentally sewed two pieces together the wrong way round.
She stared at them, then laughed so loudly that a woman passing the window looked in.
Perhaps that belonged in the class. Not the mistake itself, necessarily, but the fact that a mistake could be removed without becoming an account of one’s worth.
She wrote a note on the teaching plan: Show what to do when it goes wrong. Then she crossed out Show and wrote Let them try.
At closing time she tidied the table, washed her hands, checked the lock and called Stellan before she could invent another task.
He answered slightly breathless.
“Bad time?” she asked.
“No. I was at the far end of the garden.”
“Your garden or the giant-hand garden?”
“Mine. The less impressive one.”
She could hear a door opening, then the scrape of a chair.
“I didn’t mean to make you worry,” she said.
“I wasn’t worried.”
There was a pause.
“A little,” he admitted.
She smiled at the empty studio. “I want to say yes.”
“But?”
“But I haven’t done this for a very long time. And the end of the last thing was very recent.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to use you to prove I’m all right.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
The answer was plain enough to surprise her. He hadn’t rushed to assure her that any version of her would be welcome, however carelessly she treated him.
“I wouldn’t mean to.”
“I know that too.”
She sat on the fitting chair. “What are you looking for?”
He was quiet for long enough that she wondered whether the question had been too much.
“An evening with you,” he said. “To start with.”
“That’s evasive.”
“Yes. Sorry. I was buying time.”
She laughed, and heard him breathe out.
“I’ve dated since Elspeth died,” he said. “Not much. Nothing that lasted very long. I don’t want you to think you’re being asked to do something nobody’s done before.”
She looked at the floor, embarrassed by how much this relieved her.
“All right.”
“I’d like someone in my life. Properly, I mean. But I don’t know whether that’s you after two coffees and a frog. I know I’d like to find out.”
She closed her eyes.
“That sounds reasonable.”
“I was trying not to make it sound like a work estimate.”
“You didn’t include a completion date.”
“No. I forgot the deposit too.”
She laughed again, then let the laughter settle. “I don’t want to pretend I’m less hurt than I am.”
“Then don’t.”
“And I don’t want to spend the whole evening talking about Gareth.”
“We can talk about birds. I’m not reliable on those either.”
She leaned back in the chair. Her body had slowly stopped bracing for a condition he hadn’t imposed.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to go on a date with you.”
He was quiet for a beat. “Good.”
The warmth in the single word made her look away from the window as though somebody might see it on her face.
They discussed Thursday. The lake was half an hour away, and the path would be pleasant if the weather held. He offered to pick her up. She said she would drive herself and meet him there, then almost apologized. He simply agreed.
“Walk first,” she said. “Then we can decide about food.”
“Is that an escape clause?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you can use it too.”
“I’ll try not to.”
After they hung up, she sat still for a moment before switching off the studio lights.
At home she tried on three tops and rejected all of them for reasons she would have found absurd in a client.
The first looked as though she had tried too hard. The second looked as though she hadn’t tried at all, which was apparently different from looking natural. The third was the green one from the quiz, and she didn’t want him to think she owned only one appealing color.
She stood in her underwear in front of the wardrobe and began to laugh.
“This is ridiculous.”
It was also, beneath the ridiculousness, enjoyable. She liked having somewhere to go that might require her to consider the shape of her own shoulders. She liked wondering whether he would touch her. She liked being afraid of something that wasn’t merely another loss.
The garment bag containing her wedding dress hung at the far end of the rail. She brushed it aside to reach a blue shirt and felt the pleasure falter.
For a moment she sat on the bed.
There had been evenings with Gareth that felt like this once. Anticipation. The pleasure of choosing what he would see. She had not invented those evenings simply because he had eventually betrayed her. Remembering them hurt, and she let it hurt without canceling Thursday in her head.
She put on the blue shirt. It moved comfortably when she lifted her arms. No hat throwing required.
Her phone lit with a message from Stellan: Forecast says showers. I will bring a coat rather than make optimistic promises.
She replied, Good. I’m wearing shoes that can survive reality.
Then she took the shirt off carefully and hung it on the outside of the wardrobe, ready for Thursday.