Mira had taken the old sign down before Rafi arrived. It lay on the shop floor beneath a sheet, its gold letters still spelling their father's name. A chalk line marked where the new sign would hang.
Rafi stood in the doorway with a travel case and an envelope of measurements taken before he left. The envelope had survived the voyage better than his boots.
“I thought we were going to decide together,” he said.
“The sign maker was free on Thursday.” Mira came from behind a cutting table with pins in her mouth. She removed them, one by one, and set them in a magnetic dish. “You're early for once.”
The survey ship had spent most of its journey moving fast enough that fourteen months aboard became twenty-two years at home. Rafi had known the numbers. Knowing them did not make the shop's new fluorescent lights less strange.
When he left, Mira was twenty. She could cut a straight seam, operate the old pressing machine, and handle patient customers. Their mother kept the accounts. Rafi, at thirty-four, did the difficult fittings.
Now the fitting room was where the storeroom used to be. A woman at the far table drew a pattern on a glass screen. Two apprentices compared cuffs. Rafi recognized a pair of shears and almost nothing else.
“Who's running the place?” he asked. Mira pointed at herself.
A customer came in with a bag of blue fabric. She asked whether an alteration for her father's wheelchair would be ready by noon. Mira checked a card, asked about the chair's new armrests, and promised a fitting at eleven.
Only when the door closed did Mira pull up a stool. “I've got forty minutes. Did you eat?”
“At the port.”
“Proper food?”
“You're still doing that.”
“Asking questions?” She smiled, then turned serious. “The account from the ship came in. I put it aside for you.”
Before departure, he'd signed over the shop's daily authority and half his earnings to Mira for what he called a temporary arrangement. The contract contained both clocks: fourteen months for him, twenty-two years for them. He had not asked how temporary would feel to the person staying.
“Mum?” he asked.
“You got the message.”
“I got the words.”
Their mother had died in the ninth year of his absence. A transmission reached the ship six weeks later by its own clocks. He remembered standing in a narrow corridor, unable to make sense of the word funeral while the engines whispered behind the wall.
“She was angry with you for a while,” Mira said. “Then she stopped being angry. She was mainly irritated that you couldn't come and see the kitchen extension.”
“The roof leaked,” Mira added. “She wanted a window she could sit beside. We built it, then argued about the cupboard.”
He had carried shop measurements through space in case equipment needed replacing. Mira had repaired the roof, moved the cutting tables, borrowed for new machines, repaid the loan, changed the work they did, and seen their mother through a long illness. His envelope described a room that no longer existed.
Rafi knelt beside the sign and lifted the sheet. The paint was rough where their father's hands had patched it after the winter storms. “I told you I'd come back to work here.”
“You did.”
“I didn't say you had to do everything.”
“There wasn't a way to do half of Thursday,” Mira said. “Or half the Tuesday after it. People needed orders. Machines broke. Mum wanted the window. I had to decide things before your letters arrived.”
“You could have kept the name.”
“I kept it for twelve years after she died. Some customers still come because of him. Most come because they know I can fit a jacket to a body that doesn't fit standard sizes.” Mira covered the lettering. “It's not the same business.”
He wanted to ask why she hadn't waited one more morning. After twenty-two years, it was a small delay. He also knew the question would not be about the sign.
“You could put my name beside yours,” he said.
“On what work?”
“I can sew.”
“Of course you can. But you don't know the new fabrics, and you've never fitted a seated client. I'm not putting you on a sign because you used to be the person who taught me.”
From the cutting table came a crack. An apprentice had caught the cloth against a guide pin, tearing a cuff. Mira checked the piece, handed over fresh material, and marked the waste in a notebook. No lecture, no blame.
Rafi watched her measure twice, using a soft tape patched with red thread. Their father had bought it when Mira was a child.
At eleven, the customer returned with her father. They brought his wheelchair close to the fitting platform. Mira discussed sleeve openings, then asked whether Rafi could hold the fabric while she checked the shoulder. The man agreed.
He held the cloth. It was lighter and more elastic than he expected. When he tried measuring around the man's arm, the tape caught on a seam.
“Don't measure where the arm rests,” Mira said. “Ask him to lift it, if he can. He'll be reaching for things.”
The customer lifted his arm. Rafi moved the tape and got a different number. He wrote it on the back of his old envelope, beneath the dimensions of a pressing machine that no longer stood in the shop.
After the fitting, Mira asked him to carry the old sign into the storeroom before rain reached it. The new one was plain and dark: MIRA WORKROOM. Underneath, in smaller print: ALTERATIONS AND ADAPTIVE FITTING.
“You can work here while you find your feet,” she said. “If that's what you want.”
“And if I want something to change?”
“Tell me what it is. I'll listen. I may disagree.”
Rafi carried the sign to a dry shelf. Beside it stood boxes of orders awaiting collection and a small photograph of their mother, sitting by the kitchen window.
He returned to the cutting table. An apprentice had left a cuff unfinished. Rafi asked Mira which seam allowance they used. She showed him, then went to answer the door. By the time she came back, he had made the first mistake of his new apprenticeship, and this time he knew whom to ask.