I parked across the street and walked to the little shop two blocks down — the one I had quietly signed the lease on the week he called me a relic.
Here is what the landlord never understood: nobody sells a suit or a wedding gown that fits off the rack. Not his boutique, not the bridal shop across town, not the men’s store at the mall. For twenty-seven years, every one of them sent their alterations to me. I was the reason their clothes fit at all. When my doors closed, theirs had a problem they had never once had to think about.
His grand opening proved it by noon. A bride stepped out of the fitting room in a gown that gaped two sizes too big, and the boutique had champagne and a banner and a photographer — and not one person who could take in a seam. She stood on that little platform and cried.
He said nobody gets things tailored anymore. He forgot that everything he planned to sell would need a tailor the moment somebody tried it on.
By the end of the week, the same landlord who evicted me was quietly asking whether his boutique could send its alterations to my new shop. So were the bridal store and the funeral home. I said yes to all of them — at my rates, from my counter, two blocks from the space he had wanted me out of.
The bride from the grand opening found me too. I took her gown in myself. She wore her grandmother’s veil — the one I had re-hemmed thirty years ago for her mother’s wedding.
Three generations. Same hands.
My new shop is smaller, and the light is better, and the door is my own. Turns out a relic is just the word people use for something that outlasts them. I still take in the seams. Somebody has to.