me to find if I wanted to leave while it was dark.
His own clothes hang in the open wardrobe on a wooden bar with a piece of twine tied in the middle, to partition his half from Chaim’s, I assume. Chaim’s half is empty now, and Josef’s has only one other shirt inside: the one he was wearing the day I met him, the one he’s worn every other time I’ve seen him. Even when the donation boxes come, spilling over with linen and mothballs, he apparently never takes anything from them except for his new wedding shirt.
I tiptoe across the floor to take the shirt out of the wardrobe, cringing as the hangers clatter, but Josef doesn’t wake. The shirt is the kind of faded gray that could have once been white or once been blue; sun-starched now, but carrying the washings and weight of a hundred other days pressed on Josef’s skin. It smells clean like grass and the sun it dried in, and underneath, it smells like Josef himself, the smoky sweetness of his skin. Up close, I can confirm what I’d earlier noticed about Josef’s handiwork with the buttons: They’ve been reattached, securely but without any eye to aesthetics. The pocket is still torn. It’s not as necessary to the shirt, I suppose.
Quietly, I walk back to my dress and feel in the pocket. I’d tucked a needle and thread inside, just in case something went wrong at the last minute with Breine’s dress. I don’t think Josef will mind about the mismatched color.
Sitting on Chaim’s empty bed, I prop the lamp next to me and fix the buttons first, snipping off the crooked ones and aligning them with the buttonholes. For the pocket, I turn to a basic whipstitch, the first stitch I ever learned, with Baba Rose carefully guiding my hand as I dragged the needle through two practice scraps of cloth. This isn’t the fancy sewing reserved for the clothing at our factory. It’s the private, family sewing I would use to hem my father’s pants or to add a patch on Baba Rose’s sleeve.
“What are you doing?” Josef is still half asleep, his voice low and cracked, a crease of pillow imprinted across his cheek.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
“Are you fixing my shirt?”
“Why don’t you have more than one?”
“I have two,” he mumbles.
“Well, now you have two, because you picked out a new one for the wedding. Why didn’t you ever pick out another one before?”
“Other people need them more.”
“Josef. You had one shirt.”
“I like watching you work. You’re very good.”
“How would you know? Judging from the state of the buttons before I fixed them, you’re very bad.”
“I like watching you work.” He’s fading again, slurring his words together.
“Go back to sleep, Josef.”
I wait until his breathing has steadied again, and then I make an extra fold in the fabric of the pocket. I cut off a bit of fabric from where it won’t be noticed and quickly begin to stitch.
Z is for Zofia, 1945, who fixed one of your shirts and tore the other off you.
I twist the cloth between my fingers, as small a roll as I can make it, and work it into the extra space I’d created in the pocket, then I sew it shut. I’d be both mortified and pleased if he ever found it. My family thought it was sweet when I made these messages, but the few other times I did this for friends, I never told them. I could never decide whether they would think it was sweet or strange. Maybe it is strange. I barely know Josef.
Today I am choosing to love the person in front of me, Breine said, telling me that she planned to marry a man she hadn’t even known for two months. Not that I am saying I want to marry him. Not that I am saying I love him.
But last night we were together, and even if Josef never finds this message, I like the idea of my name being close to his skin. I like even more the idea that there is a record of what happened last night, and something could happen to me, and something could happen to Josef, but there will still be that record because I wrote it down.
Almost back at my cottage, I see a figure slipping out the door: Breine in a dressing gown, clutching something to her chest. She startles at my footsteps, then laughs when she realizes it’s