have been for years, but now, as I sit with the dress, I’m surprised to realize they’re not callused. Not in the places they used to be.
Baba Rose never let me use thimbles. She said that they dulled precision and that detailed embroidery couldn’t be accomplished with a thimble. Under her supervision, I let my index finger get raw and bloody and then get strong enough that I barely felt the throb of pushing a needle through even the thickest wools. But now I no longer have a seamstress’s hands; my index finger is no more or less battered than any other part of me.
“Breine said you needed a pair of scissors?”
I look up. Josef, standing a few feet away.
Shirt open at the throat, the hollow in his neck drawing my attention in a way I wish it wouldn’t. Now that he’s standing in front of me, I realize I wouldn’t have known what to say to him, anyway, even if he had been around these past few weeks. I don’t know why he keeps pulling away, but I know it exhausts me and makes me feel embarrassed.
“Scissors?” he says again, and now I see he’s holding a pair in his hand.
“You’re back,” I say.
“Just this morning.”
“I hope you had a nice trip,” I say stiffly, not allowing myself to say anything else, especially anything that would reveal how much I’d noticed his absence. “And I already have regular scissors. I was looking for pinking shears.”
“What are those?”
“They have a serrated edge that keeps the silk from fraying.”
“Ah,” he says. “She didn’t specify that.” Now I look closer at the ones he’s holding: silver-colored with narrow, tapered blades. “These are for the horses’ manes when they get burrs or tangles. I washed them,” he adds. “But it doesn’t sound like they’re what you’re looking for.”
“Let me see.” I take the scissors from him, run my finger along the blade, test the weight in my hand. “These are actually sharper than the ones I have. I’ll use them if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. I brought them for you.”
But then he doesn’t leave. He sits down at the table. A respectful distance but the seat next to me, just the same, which I try to ignore as I begin my work. First, I use a small, borrowed paring knife to pick loose the stitching on the bottom hem. It’s a tedious, delicate motion that I’m terrified to mess up, so I do it slowly, my nose only a few centimeters from the material. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Josef get up but return a few minutes later. He’s fetched a lamp to give me more light.
And then I can feel him looking at me. Not at my face, but at my hands, which somehow feels more personal.
The grooming shears he’s lent me are unwieldy at first. The blades don’t have an angle to them, so I can’t cut the fabric directly along the table as I normally would, which makes it harder to create a straight line. If I’d realized Josef was going to watch me, I would have used a ruler and penciled in where I planned to cut. But I make it around the circumference of the dress anyway, cutting to where I’d earlier marked the dress against Breine’s legs, scavenging fabric for me to fashion the sash I’d envisioned and to patch over any parts of the dress that are stained or threadbare. Now that I’ve shortened the garment, it’s time to rehem it. Before I can look for a pin, Josef has handed me one. And then he hands me another, and another after that. My hands are sure on the silk, and I’m remembering what it feels like to touch something expensive, what it feels like to do something I am skilled at and have done a hundred times.
As I work, the other tables in the dining hall start to fill again—card games and letter writers and other people just trying to get away from their cramped quarters for a little while. The dead-quiet background rises into a low, friendly hum.
The next pin he hands me, our hands brush together. I secret a glance to see if he’s done it on purpose, because I’m doing it on purpose: I reached too wide, so that instead of my fingers closing around the pin, they close around his angular knuckles. But as soon as I do that, Josef jerks his hand away. And then, while