Part 3
“Yes,” Gail said. She sat down again, leaving her purse on the floor. Jonah pushed the crackers away.
It had been a short recording from a therapy session, made with the staff’s permission while Beth helped him try standing. His knees had begun to shake. Beth had eased him back down, and Jonah had said, “Mom, stop,” in a voice Gail could still hear when the room was quiet. Gail had lowered the phone then, but kept the recording.
She had sent it to the family message group that evening. She had written that he was working hard. The replies had arrived while she ate cold noodles in the parking lot: hearts, encouragement, a cousin saying he would be running before she knew it. She had read them more than once before driving home.
“Who saw it?” he asked.
She named the people in the group. At one name he closed his eyes; that cousin had children at his school. Gail couldn’t tell him whether anyone had passed it on.
“Get them to delete it.”
“I can ask.”
“Then ask.”
She took out her phone. Her first attempt began with Jonah is feeling sensitive, and she erased it while he watched. She wrote that she should not have shared the recording, asked everyone to delete it and any forwarded copies, and said she would no longer send videos of his care.
“Can I read it?”
Gail turned the screen toward him. He read slowly, then pointed to the last sentence, where she had said she knew everyone meant well.
“Take that off.”
She did. She sent the message, deleted her own recording, and showed him the deleted-items folder when he asked. Then she deleted the courtyard video too.
She wanted him to know about the parking lot, the noodles, how frightened she had been when she looked at him and couldn’t find one certain thing to hope for. He was watching the screen. Gail put it facedown on her knee and kept the explanation to herself.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Jonah began gathering the crackers into their packet. He didn’t tell her it was all right. She helped hold the packet open when he nodded that she could.
Before she left, she asked him about Friday. He wanted to go home, he said; he had never said he didn’t. Then he asked whether her fitting platform would still be in the downstairs room.
“I can put it in the corner.”
“Will people come in?”
“Only when you’re at therapy. Or resting somewhere else.”
He looked at her, and Gail heard herself arranging him around the customers. For years that room had paid for the house, shoes, the dog with his expensive ear drops. Even now, two garment bags hung beside the mirror, waiting for work she had promised she could finish.
“Let me look at it again,” she said.
“I want a door I can shut.”
At home that evening, she stood in the sewing room with the overnight-leave checklist. The medical-equipment supplier had scheduled the temporary ramp and the items recommended by the rehabilitation team. The bathroom arrangements had been checked. She had measured the bed space twice and congratulated herself on being able to make everything fit.
She had not included the fitting platform in her sketch. Or the wheeled garment rack, or the basket of unfinished hems tucked beneath the cutting table. She moved the rack out and found the strip of carpet she had never vacuumed properly because it was too difficult to reach.
There was room for the bed if she put her sewing machine at the dining table. The cutting table would have to come apart. Customers would need to wait, or go somewhere else, and the work she could still take would have to fit around Jonah’s appointments and the hours she could clear the table of plates.
She called the woman waiting for a bridesmaid’s dress. The woman was sympathetic until Gail explained that she couldn’t promise completion before the wedding. There was a silence, then a request for the deposit back.
Gail agreed. After the call she put the dress into its bag and printed the refund receipt, checking the amount twice. She had bought groceries partly because she thought that deposit was money she had earned.
The next morning she carried both unfinished orders to the porch for collection. On the back of a Weller Alterations appointment card, she wrote the number of another seamstress. She didn’t know whether the woman had openings, and she said so when the customers came.
Ruth arrived after lunch carrying a cordless drill and an empty grocery sack for the containers she wanted back. Gail let her in without pretending she had almost finished. Between them they cleared the cutting table, finding a missing button and a school photograph that had slipped behind a drawer.
In the photograph Jonah’s hair stuck up on one side. Gail remembered wetting her fingers to smooth it before the bus came, and him ducking away. She put the picture on the mantel instead of packing it with the scissors.
“Where are these going?” Ruth asked, holding the long rulers.
“Garage. Along the wall.”
They worked until Ruth had to leave. Gail kept the screws from the cutting table in a jar, labeled it, and finished vacuuming alone. Without the table, the room had an echo; she could hear the refrigerator stop running in the kitchen.
She took a photograph of the cleared room and sent it only to Jonah. He answered with a request for the lamp from his desk and the small drawer that held his drawing pencils. A second message asked where Patch would sleep.
Gail typed Beside you, of course, then looked at the words for a while. She changed them to We can decide when you’re here.
On Thursday, after the equipment had arrived and the arrangements had been reviewed, she brought down his books. The little fitting platform was the last thing left. Gail carried it through the doorway on its side, scraping her knuckle, and set it in the garage with the dismantled cutting table.
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