The sixth chair would not fit.
Coralie turned it sideways, caught its back against a shelf of cotton prints, and stood with one foot trapped beneath the table. Petra watched from the doorway. Neither of them said anything until Coralie freed her shoe.
“Five people,” Petra said. “You can stand.”
“I thought sitting would make it less like school.”
“Depends what you do when they get something wrong.”
Coralie carried the chair out. It was a perfectly ordinary folding chair, yet taking it through the shop felt like admitting defeat before the class had begun. She had arrived forty minutes early with six sample bags, three versions of her instructions, and the conviction that she could make ninety minutes useful to five strangers. Now the tables looked small, the samples looked childish, and she could not remember whether she had brought the right glasses.
Petra took a sample from the table. The little cloth bag had a crooked purple handle, chosen to show that everything did not have to match. Under the shop lights it looked as if someone had made a mistake buying the trim.
“This is good,” Petra said.
“You don’t have to say that.”
“I’m paying you. I would rather tell you now if it wasn’t.”
She put it down and went to unlock the front door.
The first woman arrived with a machine in a wheeled case and wanted to know whether there would be time to learn buttonholes. Coralie explained the project. The woman looked at the little bag, then at the bag she had brought, which was larger and plainly much more useful.
“It’s a starting point,” Coralie said.
“I’ve started before.”
“Then we can try a different finish on yours.”
The next two came together, talking over each other about where they had parked. A young man carried nothing except the confirmation on his phone. The last participant was a small woman with a bright orange pencil case. She apologized for being late while the clock still showed three minutes before the start.
Coralie welcomed them, told them where the bathroom was, and began explaining the sample. She reached the end of her first paragraph before noticing that the young man had not sat down.
“Sorry. Is this seat taken?” he asked.
“No. That’s yours.”
She had placed her own bag on it.
There was a little laughter, kind enough. Coralie moved her things. Her face was hot. She had handled brides in tears, a split zip minutes before a ceremony, and a woman who had brought the wrong dress to an appointment. Five people watching her take her handbag off a chair seemed worse than all of them.
She abandoned the second paragraph of her introduction.
“What do you want to be able to do?” she asked.
The woman with the wheeled case said buttonholes again. One of the friends wanted to stop taking her pants to her mother. The other wanted an evening out. The young man said his grandmother had left him her machine and he did not know whether it worked. The woman with the orange case touched her sample fabric.
“I’d like to finish something.”
Coralie glanced at her three pages of instructions. She laid them face down.
“All right. Let’s start with that.”
For ten minutes it went well. Then she demonstrated a step too quickly, and all five tried it differently. The two friends disagreed about what she had said. The woman with the wheeled case had already moved ahead and was unpicking her seam with a tight mouth. The young man raised a hand as if asking to leave the room.
“Mine’s eaten it.”
Coralie went to him. His fabric had slipped under the little metal plate. She could have freed it in a moment. Her hand was already reaching before she stopped.
“Do you want to do it, or would you like me to?”
“Me. If you don’t mind waiting.”
She knelt beside his chair and talked him through it. He took longer than she would have, and the woman with the wheeled case sighed behind her. Coralie heard the sigh as distinctly as a door slamming. She wanted to speed him up, to prove to the woman that she knew what she was doing.
Instead, she waited while he found the caught thread.
“Oh,” he said. “There.”
His grin was immediate and astonishingly pleased. Coralie grinned back before she could turn it into encouragement.
By the time she returned to the front of the table, one of the friends had sewn her handle to the wrong side. The other was laughing so hard she could not explain why. The woman with the orange case had not begun.
“I’m holding everyone up,” she said.
“No.”
“You don’t need to be nice about it.”
Coralie drew up the discarded sixth chair from the doorway. It fitted at the end if she sat with her knees angled toward the shelves.
“I went too fast,” she said. “Can I show you again?”
The woman nodded, staring down. This time Coralie used a scrap and made the movement slowly. She did not fill the silence. At last the woman took her own piece and tried it. Her seam wandered. She looked up as though expecting a verdict.
“Keep going,” Coralie said.
Across the table, the impatient woman checked the clock.
At the break Coralie went through the stockroom to the tiny sink. She ran cold water over her wrists. She had not thought there would be a break, but Petra had appeared with a tray and announced one. From the back she could hear the participants talking without her, their voices relaxed now that they did not have to listen.
Petra came in carrying an empty packet of biscuits.
“I lost them,” Coralie said.
“Which ones?”
“All of them, briefly.”
Petra put the packet in the trash can. “The woman at the end wanted a different class. I should have asked more when she booked.”
“I said I could give her a different finish.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. But not while I’m teaching four beginners.”
“Tell her that.”
Coralie dried her wrists. In the mirror above the sink, a strand of hair had escaped her clip and curled against her cheek. She tucked it back and watched it fall out again.
“I wanted them all to go home delighted.”
“I want that when people buy three yards of something. They still sometimes buy the wrong color.”
Petra went back to the shop before Coralie could turn the conversation into a request for reassurance.
The second half began with an apology for going too fast and a clearer demonstration. Coralie told the woman with the wheeled case that she could answer one particular question at the end, but they would not reach buttonholes tonight.
The woman looked displeased. “That wasn’t clear in the listing.”
“Then we’ll make it clearer.”
Petra, passing the doorway, nodded once.
It was an uncomfortable minute. Coralie survived it. The young man finished his first side and held it up, proud of a row of stitches she would normally have asked an apprentice to redo. She pointed out where it had gone straight, then showed him how to begin the next side more steadily. He listened. The room settled into the low, uneven sound of work.
One friend stopped sewing to tell a story about her mother. Coralie let it run until the other friend said, “Are you going to let the poor woman finish?” Everyone laughed. Coralie liked them much better when she stopped trying to keep them quiet.
The young man asked whether he could put the handle on across the corners instead. Coralie almost said that was not the project. She had spent the previous evening arranging each stage so that nobody would need to improvise, and his suggestion upset the order in her head.
“Show me what you mean,” she said.
He laid the pieces out. It would make an odd little pouch, but it would work. The woman beside him leaned across to look.
“I like that better.”
“You can try it,” Coralie told him. “I can’t promise the shape will be exactly what you expect.”
“Nothing has been so far.”
He said it cheerfully. She moved her carefully finished sample out of his way. For the first time that evening, she was curious about what someone else would make rather than anxious about whether they could copy her. Petra caught her eye from the counter, but Coralie was already bending to see where he meant to put the second handle.
The woman with the orange case was the last to finish. Her bag had one shorter handle and a small tuck near the bottom. She put her pencil case inside it, took it out, and put it back again.
“I made that,” she said, so softly Coralie nearly missed it.
At the doorway, Stellan lifted a hand.
She had invited him to come for the final ten minutes and walk her home afterward. All afternoon she had regretted it. Now she was glad to see his big, slightly awkward figure beside the narrow shelf of ribbon. He stayed there until Petra pointed him toward a stool near the counter. He sat without trying to join in.
Coralie could feel his attention while she answered the last questions. It made her stand a little straighter, which annoyed her. She was thirty-eight, not a girl hoping someone would watch her win a prize. Then the young man held up his bag again, and she forgot to think about herself.
“My grandmother would have told me to iron it,” he said.
“She’d have a point.”
“Would she have hated it?”
“I didn’t know her.”
He considered that, then laughed. “She’d have pretended not to.”
When they began leaving, Coralie waited for the woman with the orange case to say something else. The woman simply thanked her and went. The impatient participant stayed to ask her question, received an answer, and said she would look for an intermediate class next time. No disaster, no conversion. Coralie folded the unused instructions and put them in her bag.
Stellan rose when she approached.
She took his washed handkerchief from her bag and handed it back. “From the lake. Before I forget again.” He tucked it into his pocket with a quiet thank-you.
“You were very patient,” he said.
“I was furious twice.”
“I didn’t see that.”
“Good.”
“Was one of them with the thing that kept beeping?”
“That was Petra’s card machine.”
“Ah.” He looked back at it. “I was wondering what it was sewing.”
She laughed, tired enough that it escaped without restraint. He smiled at her mouth. The look was brief, but she felt it all the way down her arms.
Petra paid her before they left. Coralie counted the notes automatically and then wished she had not done it in front of Stellan. He was studying a display of buttons, apparently without noticing.
“I’ll send you what I think worked,” Petra said. “And what I would change. Tomorrow, when neither of us is hungry.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You earned it.”
Outside, the evening was still light. Coralie had brought too much, and the strap of her tote cut into her shoulder. Stellan offered to take it. She handed it over without making him ask twice.
They walked past the shut bakery and a child trying to persuade an elderly dog to hurry. Coralie told him about the first half of the class. He did not say it had all been wonderful. When she described promising the impatient woman a special finish, he winced.
“You gave yourself two jobs.”
“Yes.”
“I do that when I don’t want someone to be cross.”
“Does it work?”
“No. Then I’m cross as well.”
At the corner, he stopped to shift her bag to his other shoulder. A loose length of purple trim trailed from the top. Coralie tucked it in, her fingers brushing his wrist. Neither of them moved away immediately.
“I wanted you to see it going well,” she said.
“The woman with the little case. She looked happy.”
“She did.”
“That’s what I saw.”
He started walking again. Coralie caught up and put her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, warm and rough at the edges. She liked the ordinary visibility of it, walking past windows with another person’s hand in hers. Then she remembered Bryony and the conversation they had not finished, and the pleasure thinned a little.
Stellan glanced at her. “Sunday. Are you working all day?”
“Until one.”
“Would you come and see the garden afterward? The one I’ve been working on. I’ve asked the owner. She’ll be away, but she said we’re welcome.”
“Are you looking for help?”
“No. I’ve got help.” He hesitated. “I want you to see it.”
“What if I don’t like it?”
“Then I’ll be annoyed.”
She looked at him.
“For a bit,” he added.
At her building, she took her bag back. A bus passed, filling the narrow street with noise. She waited for it to go before saying yes.
He bent to kiss her. She had been expecting a brief goodnight. Instead he paused near enough that she could feel his breath, and she lifted her face the last small distance. Her hand caught the front of his jacket. The bag slid from her shoulder and knocked against the door.
“That sounded expensive,” he said against her cheek.
“Samples.”
“Oh. Carry on, then.”
She did, until a neighbor came down the stairs behind the glass and they had to move aside.
Upstairs, Coralie emptied the tote onto her table. One of the spare bags had lost its handle. She left it where it lay and took out the money Petra had paid her. Then she put the money away too. Her phone lit with a message from Stellan: Sunday, two? Wear shoes you don’t mind getting dirty.
She typed, How annoyed?
His reply came while she was still smiling.
Depends what you don’t like.
She looked down at her comfortable, entirely clean shoes and began wondering what he had made.