Petra read the first page and turned straight to the last.
Coralie resisted the urge to tell her that the middle contained some excellent material. She had printed the proposal twice because the first copy had a small mark on it. Now the second lay beneath Petra’s hand beside a mug whose base had already threatened the corner.
“Four sessions,” Petra said.
“Yes. Saturday evenings. Two hours each.”
“And they finish something?”
“Something small. Depending on how much they’ve done before. The point is to make choices themselves rather than copy exactly what I put in front of them.”
Petra looked up. “What do I write on the sign?”
Coralie had spent an unreasonable amount of time on the educational value and almost none on a sign. “Making Something Your Own?”
“Question mark?”
“That wasn’t part of it.”
“Good. Sounds as though you’re not sure.”
Beyond the counter, a customer was considering two almost identical rolls of fabric with the expression of a person who suspected one was lying. Petra raised a hand to acknowledge her, then turned back to the proposal.
“I liked the trial,” she said. “People stayed. One came back and bought more supplies. The young man told me he finally understood why his machine kept chewing things.”
Coralie remembered him looking up from the freed fabric, astonished that it was still usable. She began to smile.
“But,” Petra said.
The smile stopped.
“If I move the print shelves, I can fit eight people in here. You’ve got ten on this page.”
“I thought ten made the fee work better for you.”
“Not if two of them spend the evening in the doorway.”
Coralie took out her pen. Ten had been an attempt to make herself easier to choose. She had imagined the extra students, the extra attention, the greater chance that someone would leave dissatisfied, and written the number anyway.
“Eight,” she agreed.
“And a minimum. I can’t pay for four evenings with two people enrolled.”
“Five?”
Petra considered. “Five would work. Same fee for you at five or eight. I want you teaching, not counting chairs every week.”
Coralie looked down at the number beside her name. She had checked it three times at home. Here, with Petra saying it aloud, it sounded both larger and less secure.
“That works for me.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I am. I’m trying not to offer you a discount out of nerves.”
Petra’s mouth twitched. “Please don’t. I’ve just done the arithmetic.”
Petra opened a drawer and brought out a little square of fabric with a crooked seam across it. “Someone from the trial left this. She said you could use it to show people what not to do.”
Coralie recognized the square. The woman had worked slowly, shoulders pulled high, apologizing every time she asked for help.
“I’d rather not,” she said.
“Even if she offered?”
“Especially then, perhaps. She was quite hard on herself.”
Petra ran her finger along the uneven edge. “What would you say if she came back?”
Coralie took the square. “I’d ask whether she minded the line being crooked.”
“It’s very crooked.”
“Yes. But if she likes it, we’re done. If she doesn’t, we can try again. I’d want to know which before I started improving it for her.”
She could hear herself becoming earnest. She stopped and smoothed the little square against the counter. One corner had been turned neatly, with obvious care. She remembered the woman’s pleasure in getting that part right.
“She did this well,” Coralie said, pointing. “I should have told her sooner.”
Petra studied her for a moment. “That’s the course I want on the sign. Somehow.”
“Not Crooked Seams?”
“Probably not.”
They both smiled. Petra put the square aside rather than back in the drawer.
“I don’t want them leaving with something perfect if they never touch it again,” Coralie said. “I’d rather they leave knowing what they want to try next.”
“Some will want a perfect cushion.”
“Then we’ll aim for that. I can be flexible.”
“Good. They’ll all be paying the same price.”
Coralie nodded. She had imagined brave discoveries and the pleasure of invention. Petra was right to remind her that an ordinary useful object could be somebody else’s entire ambition. She made a small note beside the proposed first exercise, changing choose an original design to choose something you want.
The customer approached with one roll. Petra asked Coralie to excuse her and went to cut the length. Coralie stayed at the counter, listening to the scissors and the low conversation, unable to decide whether the interruption was merciful or unbearable. A course in an actual shop, with people paying actual money, seemed a more unreasonable ambition than it had in her apartment.
She turned the proposal over. On the back she had written a list of things that could go wrong: beginners needing more help, someone choosing an unsuitable project, machines failing, her own explanation making sense only to her. Beneath it she had written, in much smaller letters, Ask what they want to make.
Petra returned and noticed the list.
“You haven’t got floods on there.”
“Should I?”
“No. Though the sink blocked once.”
Coralie laughed, and Petra took the proposal before she could add it.
They settled on September sixteenth, twenty-third, thirtieth, and October seventh as the proposed dates. Petra would confirm by July tenth after checking the shop’s other commitments. If they went ahead, enrollment would close once eight places were filled; five would be enough to run it. The materials list would fit on one page. Petra was particularly firm about that.
“People should be able to come without buying the whole shop,” she said. “Although I’m not opposed to it.”
“One page.”
Coralie crossed out the second list she had prepared. Half the things on it were things she liked owning, not things a beginner needed. She imagined arriving tired after work and being handed three pages of equipment to buy. Petra watched her draw the line, then nodded once. It was the first moment of the meeting when Coralie felt they were planning the same evening.
“And keep some of what happened at the trial. When you stopped talking and let them try. That was good.”
The praise was so specific that Coralie could accept it without immediately looking for the qualification. She remembered being frightened by the noise of five students working at once, then discovering she could move among them rather than hold the entire room in a speech.
“I can do that,” she said.
Petra put the proposal under the counter, safely away from the mug. “I’ll call you on the tenth.”
Outside, Coralie stood on the sidewalk with her empty folder. She wanted to tell somebody she had submitted it. She also wanted to tell nobody until it could not be refused.
She took a photograph of the shop window, which contained nothing about her course, and sent it to Stellan with the words It’s in.
His answer came while she was putting her phone away.
Good. Mine’s gone sideways. See you later?
He was in his back garden when she arrived, sitting on the low step with his elbows on his knees. A glass of water stood beside him. He had not changed out of his work clothes, and the tiredness in his face was not entirely physical.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“In a minute. How was Petra?”
Coralie sat down. She told him about the eight places, the five-person minimum, and Petra’s opinion of the sign. He smiled at the right places, but his attention kept slipping toward a stack of papers on the kitchen table beyond the open door.
“You don’t have to do this first,” she said.
“I want to hear.”
“You’re not hearing.”
He rubbed his face. “Sorry.”
“What happened?”
The owner of the walled garden had decided to postpone a section Stellan had wanted to restore before autumn. The work was not canceled, exactly, but the word later had arrived without a date attached. The crew had other paid jobs. Nobody’s wages depended on it. That seemed to make him feel less entitled to be upset, which made him more upset.
“It’s her garden,” he said. “She can do what she wants.”
“And you wanted something else.”
“Yes.”
She waited. He picked at a dry mark on his thumb.
“Could you show her the photographs again? The ones you showed me? Maybe she doesn’t see what you’re trying to—”
“She sees.”
“Or do a smaller part first.”
“We’ve discussed it.”
“I was only thinking there might be a way—”
“Coralie.”
She stopped. He had not raised his voice, but the interruption was sharp enough to sting.
“I know how to speak to my client.”
The garden sounded very quiet. Somewhere beyond the fence, someone started a mower, then stopped it almost immediately.
“All right,” she said.
He looked away. She sat with her hands in her lap, no longer certain where to put herself. She had wanted to help. It was irritating to discover that this explanation did not improve the result merely because she was the person offering it.
“I didn’t say you didn’t,” she added, which was not as dignified as leaving it alone.
“I know.”
“You made it sound as though I’d been very stupid.”
He turned back. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I know that too. It still sounded like it.”
Stellan breathed out. “I’m disappointed. I’ve spent all day being reasonable about it. Then you came and I wasn’t.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yes. Sorry.”
She looked at the far corner of his garden, where one plant leaned untidily over another. She could have left. She could also have spent the rest of the evening demonstrating how little help she intended to offer him ever again. Neither prospect appealed once she imagined the effort involved.
“I can stop making suggestions,” she said. “But you have to tell me what you’re asking for before I get through five of them.”
“Company. I think.”
“You could have opened with that.”
“I’m finding that out.”
He moved his hand on the step until it rested near hers. She touched his little finger with her own. The annoyance did not vanish, but it became possible to sit beside it.
For a while he told her what he had hoped to do, without asking her to find a way to make it happen. She asked one question about the corner she had seen in the photographs and got an answer that was longer than she needed. Halfway through it he caught himself.
“Too much?”
“A little. I understand that you’re cross about it.”
“That’s the important bit.”
He finally drank the water, grimacing because it had gone warm.
Coralie rested her chin on her knees. “I keep wanting Petra to call now.”
“She said the tenth?”
“Yes. She’s had it for almost four hours. Surely that’s enough time to reorganize her whole autumn.”
He smiled. “Have you checked your phone?”
“An embarrassing number of times.”
“You can check it here. I won’t count.”
She took it out, confirmed that nothing had happened, and put it facedown between them.
They made dinner together badly. Stellan began one task and abandoned it to hunt for something in the refrigerator. Coralie moved an item he had placed deliberately within reach. For several minutes they circled each other with the awkwardness of people who knew one another’s bodies better than one another’s kitchens.
“Where would you like me?” she asked finally.
He looked at her, then at the counter, and smiled in a way that changed the question.
“For this,” she said, holding up the spoon.
“There. Please.”
She stayed there. He passed behind her, his hand briefly warm at her waist, and her irritation loosened another degree. They ate at the table with the garden papers moved to a chair. He asked her to explain the course again, and this time he listened closely enough to ask what she would do if every student wanted to make something different.
“Panic privately,” she said. “Then find the part they can do together.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
“You don’t have to sound surprised.”
Afterward he showed her a photograph on his phone, taken that morning. The garden wall caught a strip of sun; an ordinary chair stood nearby, empty. She looked at it for a long time.
“I’d like to sit there,” she said.
“You can.”
“Even if the rest waits?”
He considered the picture again. “Yes. Even then.”
She did not tell him this meant he should be less disappointed. She handed back the phone.
On the drive home she remembered his hand reaching for hers on the step. At a red light she turned her palm upward against her knee.
At her apartment, the cotton mockup waited over a chair. She tried it on once more, changed the angle at the waist, and saw the shape she had been trying to reach. There it was, imperfect but visible.
Her phone lit up. For an absurd instant she thought it was Petra.
Stellan had sent another picture of the chair, this one taken from farther back, with a circle drawn around a second space beside it.
For you, if you still want it.
Coralie looked at the mockup in the mirror. She sent a photograph in return, carefully excluding the untidy bedroom behind her.
Getting closer, she wrote.
Then she set the phone in the kitchen to charge, where she could not see the screen from her bed.