The Tailor Who Hemmed the Distance

How it begins

The first coat saved a woman three hours.

Sena had taken up the hem by two inches.

Mrs. Pell returned the next morning with a jar of marmalade and an expression that suggested the coat had done something beyond fitting.

"My son came for supper."

"Lovely."

"He lives in the north."

"Lovely," Sena said again, less confidently.

"He walked."

Outside the shop, the street ended at the harbor. It always had. Sena could measure the distance from her door to the water without leaving the worktable.

That morning it looked slightly farther away.

She blamed the light.

By Friday, a shortened pair of trousers had brought two brothers together in the same train carriage after eighteen years of choosing different holidays.

By Monday, a schoolteacher's daughter had found her mother's house at the end of the street instead of across the county.

The teacher was delighted.

The daughter was not.

Tomas arrived with a surveying pole.

"Has your shop moved?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

She gestured at the worktable, the old mirror and the stain on the wall where the roof leaked every November.

He looked at them politely.

"The harbor is eleven meters farther from the town."

"Perhaps the tide."

"On land?"

Sena put down her scissors.

A coat waited on the mannequin. Its owner had asked for the hem to be shortened before her sister's wedding.

She had also asked whether it was possible to make somebody stop finding excuses not to come home.

Sena looked at the folded fabric.

Two inches. Four hours. An entire argument she had not been invited to settle.

Tomas watched her unfold the hem.

In the street outside, a man carrying fish stopped and looked back toward the harbor.

The sea made a low sound, as though somebody had drawn a heavy curtain across a floor.

Sena took the customer's telephone number from the order book.

For once, a fitting required a question before the scissors.