SPH-THEMED EROTICA STORIES

There is one question a tailor gets to ask that nobody else on earth is allowed to.

Odessa Fontaine has been asking it a long time, and it has never once gotten old.

“Which side do you dress on, sugar?”

The young man in the booth looked down at her with his belt in his hand and no idea in the world what she meant.

“Ma’am?”

“Left or right.” She had the tape around her neck and the chalk in her teeth, and she did not look up. “Which side does it lie on when you stand normal?”

“Which side does what lie?”

“Your cock, honey.”

He made a sound. From the front room, where the curtain does not go all the way to the floor and never has, five women stopped talking at the same time. Then one of them said something, and the rest of them came apart.

“They can hear us,” he said.

“They sure can.”

“Miss Dess–”

“Left or right, Grady. That wedding is two weeks out, and I have got nine more of you.”

* * *

The shop is on the square, between the pharmacy and the insurance office. She opens it at nine.

She does alterations, formalwear, and every bridal gown that gets worn in that county. There is a drawer behind that counter with a card for most of the women on that square, and each card has a set of numbers the woman herself has never seen.

The front room has the dresses in it and the sofa. The back has the cutting table, the machines, the press, and the three-way mirror on the raised platform where anybody in that town who ever had to look good has stood and been looked at.

She works with the radio on. She keeps a jar of butterscotch on the counter that nobody has ever seen her eat out of.

She has had that shop about two years. That is the whole of what anybody in that town knows about her, and it has been plenty.

* * *

Patrice Mabry had been in that shop twice about her daughter’s wedding and had decided exactly nothing both times.

The first time she brought pictures. The second time she brought different pictures and a sister. Odessa had poured coffee both times and let her talk herself in and out of a circle, and had said, both times, that there was plenty of time, and had meant it, and had not been right.

The third time was the first week of October, and Patrice came through that door with her jaw set.

“Dess.”

“Patrice.”

“I have made every decision I am going to make, and I made all of them in the car.”

“All right.”

“The rental place sent the wrong sizes on everything. Every tux, both sizes off, and two of the dresses were cut for a woman who is not in this wedding.” She put two garment bags on the counter, then went out to the truck, and came back with the rest. “Marcy is losing her mind. My sister is not helping. And I told everybody in that house that I was going to come down here and hand it to you, and then I was going to go home and sit down.”

Odessa unzipped the first bag and looked, and it was bad, and the second one was worse.

“When is it?”

“Two weeks.”

“Patrice.”

“I know.”

“Two weeks.”

“Dess, I know.”

Odessa laid the trousers out flat on the counter, put her hand on the seat of them, felt what somebody had done to the rise, and stood there a second.

“I need all ten of them in here at once,” she said. “Not one at a time and not over four days. All ten, in this shop, on one afternoon, for as long as it takes.”

“Fine.”

“And I do not want anybody’s mother in here while I work.”

Patrice Mabry did not answer that right away.

* * *

She had been standing with her purse still on her shoulder, and she took it off and set it down, which, in that woman, is a whole paragraph.

“Can I say something to you?”

“You surely can.”

“I was at Delia’s.”

Odessa Fontaine kept her hands moving on the cloth because her hands always move, and because a woman who stops what she is doing has just answered the question.

“You were.”

“I was in that yard the whole time. I was sitting three feet from you.” Patrice was picking at the edge of the counter with her thumbnail. “And I am not going to ask you what I saw, because I have thought about it every day since June and I have gotten exactly nowhere, and because I like you, and because in my experience when a woman does not volunteer a thing there is a reason and it is usually a good one.”

“That’s about right.”

“So I am not asking.”

“I know you’re not, sugar.”

“But my Marcy is marrying a nice boy, and standing up with the two of them is the loneliest bunch of grown people I have ever laid eyes on.” Patrice looked up. “Every one of them is single. Every one, on both sides. My daughter is the first of that whole crowd to go, and they have all been walking around since the engagement with a look on them as somebody died.”

“I have seen it.”

“They are good people and not one of them knows how to say a true thing out loud.” Patrice picked her purse back up. “And you are going to have all ten of them in this shop with the door shut for as long as it takes.”

Neither of them said anything for a second.

“Go home and sit down, Patrice.”

“I’m going.”

“I mean it. Go sit down.”

“Dess.” Patrice Mabry stopped in the doorway with her hand on the frame. “Whatever it is that you do.”

“Patrice.”

“I’m not asking.” She went out. Then she put her head back in. “But you have got my blessing, and I have never in my life said that sentence to anybody about anything, and I would appreciate it if you did not make me say it twice.”

The bell over the door went off behind her.

Odessa Fontaine stood in her own front room with a pair of ruined trousers in both hands and laughed until she had to sit down on the sofa.

* * *

They came in at two and the shop got small.

Five young women and five young men, all of them in that stretch of the twenties where a wedding stops being a party and starts being a scoreboard. Every one of them had watched Marcy Mabry cross over to the other side of something that summer, and every one of them had felt the identical thing about it, and not one of them had said so out loud to another living soul.

Odessa stood at the counter and let them fill up her front room and read them the way she reads everybody.

Junie Tackett was the maid of honor, and she had a folder. Not the wedding folder. She had that too. This was the other one, and she had shown it to three people at a bachelorette party in July and had not been able to take it back since.

“It’s a rubric,” Junie said, to nobody. “It’s not a list. A list is unhinged. A rubric is a tool.”

“She scores men,” said Lacey Vardaman, who had the loudest mouth in the county and knew it and had built an entire personality on it. “She scored a man at a funeral.”

“He was there. He had qualities.”

Georgia Mulcahy was on the sofa with her shoes off. She had been engaged once, for eleven months, to somebody who is not in this story, and it had come apart in a way that made her careful about everything afterward. She did not score anybody. She had stopped letting herself want things where people could see.

Fern Baptiste was the youngest and the frankest human being any of them had ever met. Fern said what she wanted out loud, always, immediately, and it had been getting her in trouble since she was fifteen and had never once slowed her down.

“I want to say something,” Fern said.

“Don’t,” said Junie.

“I’m going to say it anyway. If the tux fittings happen in front of us, I’ll look. I’m telling everybody now so nobody acts surprised later.”

“Nobody is going to act surprised.”

And Sabine Crowder stood by the window and said nothing, which is what Sabine does. She was tall and quiet, and she had said perhaps forty words all week. The other four had known her since middle school and would have told you she was shy. They were wrong about that in a way they were going to find out before dark.

* * *

The men were worse because they were pretending.

Grady Hennessy was the best man, and he came in like he had the deed. He had been the best-looking one in every room he ever walked into, and it had done all his thinking for him since he was sixteen.

Sonny Vantrease was five foot six and the funniest person in the building, and he had gotten there the hard way. Sonny worked out early that if he said the joke first, nobody else got to.

Ezra Sandifer had not slept. Ezra was in love with somebody in that front room, had been for two years, had never said one word about it, and was not going to.

Wyatt Trujillo was the quiet, good-looking one everybody assumed was a jerk. He was not a jerk. He was slow to talk, and nobody had ever waited long enough to find out.

And Huck Lasko stood in the corner with his arms folded and his shoulders up around his ears, and there was not one thing about him worth a second look, and that was the whole trouble.

Nobody had ever once wondered about Huck Lasko in his life, and he had spent ten years making very sure that nobody started.

* * *

Odessa watched all of that from behind her counter in about ninety seconds.

Then she went to the back, stood at her cutting table with both hands flat on it, and thought.

Thirteen boys in a sorority house gives you a year. Boys strive, and striving is thin, bright, quick stuff, and you need an armful of it to make anything out of.

Four husbands in their sixties, in a locked room, finding out what their wives had known the whole time, gave her twenty years and cost her the town where it happened.

Two men in a back yard in June, one of them doing it to himself out of pure spite, had taught her the thing she had needed for two hundred years and had never once had to learn, which is how to put her foot down on it and tell it where to go.

She had never had this.

Ten of them, none of them attached to anybody, in the two weeks before a wedding, all looking around a room at each other with the same private ache running in both directions at once.

The men out there wanted not to be laughed at. That was all it was. Every one of them had run the same reel on the drive over, and in the reel there is a curtain and a woman with a tape and a number; afterward, the bridesmaids know the number.

And the women wanted a man who was not a joke, and a man who could actually do it, and a man who would not need it explained to him, and every one of them had been taught since she was a girl that it was rude to say so.

For two hundred years, she has taken the men’s side in that room.

She had never in all that time had the women’s side of it going at the same time, in the same building, about each other.

She stood at her cutting table, worked out what that was going to be worth, got a number she did not believe, checked it, and got it again.

Then she thought about Patrice Mabry standing in her doorway, saying, “You have got my blessing,” and about a face that has to be behind that counter at nine in the morning.

“Well,” Odessa said out loud, to a room with nobody in it. “That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

Then she picked up her pins and went out front.

* * *

“Change of plan,” Odessa said. “Everybody in the back.”

“All of us?” said Junie.

“All of you.”

“Like, the guys too?”

“Especially the guys.” She held the curtain. “Come on.”

They filed in. The back room is bigger than the front, but it is not big, and ten people in it puts everybody about two feet from everybody else, which is what she wanted and the entire reason she did it.

“Sit where you can see.”

The women got the bench along the wall and the two chairs. The men stood, because there was nowhere else.

Odessa went up on the platform in front of the three-way mirror and turned around.

“Here is where we are, and I am going to give it to you straight, because I am too old for coy and because that wedding is in two weeks.

“There are ten garments in this shop, and every one of them is wrong. The trousers are wrong in the seat, the rise, and the leg. Two of the dresses were cut for a woman who is not in this room. Marcy’s mother has already made her peace with it and gone home to sit down.

“I can do it. I have done worse. But I cannot do it one at a time behind a curtain, because that is nine hours I do not have, and because a wedding party has to match, and matching is not a thing you can do to one person at a time.”

She let that sit.

“So we do it out here, all together, and I am going to work fast, and the reason I want the ladies watching is that the ladies are the ones who have to look at these men in every photograph anybody takes for the rest of their lives. You are the customer. You get a vote. That is not me being cute. That is how a fitting has always worked, and it is the only reason anybody’s grandfather ever looked good in a suit.”

Nobody said anything.

“Gentlemen. In about four minutes I am going to have you take your pants off and stand up here in a line, all five at once, and I am going to measure you where the trousers actually have to fit, and I am going to say the numbers out loud so my hands stay free.”

Grady laughed. It came out at the wrong pitch, and he heard it that way.

“Now the part nobody ever believes,” Odessa said.

She stepped down off the platform.

“You don’t have to do this. There is a fitting room right there with a curtain on it, and I will do every one of you alone, one at a time, after everybody else has gone home, and it will run me to three in the morning and I will do it and never say a word about it to a living soul.”

She let that sit where they could all look at it.

“That door goes out to the alley. Anybody who would rather have the curtain, go stand by it now, and I will keep you back and do you last, and you will be in your own bed by midnight, and nobody in this shop will say one word about it ever.”

Nobody went and stood by the door.

“All right, then. I want you to notice what you just did, because I am not going to bring it up again. Every one of you had a way out of this that cost you nothing, and not one of you took it.”

She took the pins out of the cushion on her wrist.

“Jackets on. All five of you, up here, shoulder to shoulder, facing the glass.”

“And ladies,” Odessa said, “I am going to tell you what your job is this afternoon, and then I do not want to hear one apology out of anybody about doing it.

“You are the customer. Not them. Their mothers rented these clothes, and I am altering them. Still, you are the five people who have to stand shoulder to shoulder with these men on the day, in pictures that will be hanging in somebody’s hallway fifty years from now, and still looked at long after every one of us in this room is dead and gone.

“So you are going to tell me what you think. Out loud. About all of it. And I do not want one polite word out of any of you today, because polite is how a man ends up in a suit that makes him look like his own uncle.”

Lacey Vardaman sat forward with her drink.

“Any of it?”

“Any of it, sugar.”

“Miss Dess, I want to be very sure I understand what I’m being invited to do here.”

“I believe you understand it perfectly.”

* * *

The first thing she did was make them look at themselves.

That is the whole difference between a tailor and everybody else, and she has never once had to explain it. A doctor puts you on a table where you can only see the ceiling. A tailor puts you on a box in front of a three-way mirror and stands behind you.

So they went up there in the ill-fitting jackets and the dumpy pants. The room was behind them, and in front of them were the center panel and the two wings; there was nowhere in that glass to look that felt safe.

They could see themselves. They could see the man on either side. They could see, over their own shoulders, five women on a bench who had just been handed permission.

It took about forty seconds.

“Okay, so those pants are a crime,” said Lacey.

“They sure are.”

“No, I mean on Grady specifically. Whoever cut those has never once in his life thought about a man’s ass, and it shows.”

Grady Hennessy said, “Excuse me?”

“You have got a good one, and that fabric is hiding it. I have been looking at it since the parking lot, and I have been robbed.”

“Lacey.”

“I am participating,” said Lacey Vardaman. “I was invited.”

Junie already had her phone out and was making notes on it, which she would not admit to for years.

* * *

Odessa worked the jackets and let the room go.

She put Wyatt Trujillo’s shoulder right with two pins, and Fern Baptiste said “oh, that is not fair” out loud, and Wyatt said “what,” and Fern said “nothing, turn back around,” and Wyatt looked at himself in that glass a long moment and went a color.

She pulled up Sonny’s sleeves and showed him his own wrists.

“A short man in a coat that fits will walk past a tall man in a rental every day of the week.”

“Every day,” said Lacey, from the bench, immediately.

“You are doing something,” Sonny told the mirror, “and I want everybody to know that I know what you are doing.”

Then she got to Huck Lasko’s jacket and brought the two front edges as close together as they were ever going to come, which was not close.

“Who sized this?”

“The rental place. Off a chart.”

“A chart has never had its hands on anybody. I am going to have to build you a different coat from this one, and it will take me most of a night. Do not apologize to me.”

He shut his mouth on the apology he had already started.

* * *

Here is the part that got away from her a little, and she let it.

Standing on a box in front of a mirror for an hour, being handled by a woman with a tape while five women you have known since school say things about your body out loud, does something to a man in his twenties, and it does it whether he has given permission or not.

Ezra Sandifer was the first one it happened to.

It happened in rented wool in front of a lit mirror, and there was not one thing on God’s earth he could do about it, and he knew the exact second the room noticed, because the room stopped.

“Oh,” said Fern.

“Do not,” said Ezra.

“I’m not going to say anything.”

“You are going to say something.”

“I am going to say one thing, and then I am done,” said Fern Baptiste. “That is a compliment to everybody in this room, and I think it’s lovely and I would like the afternoon to continue.”

Junie Tackett did not say a word. Junie had gone very still on that bench with her phone face down on her knee, because she had done the piece of work everybody else in the room had not, which was to notice when it had started.

It had started when she leaned forward to see past Lacey. She had done it without deciding to, the way you lean to see a thing, and she had watched his face change in the glass while she was still doing it, and she had put her back against that bench and had not said one word about it since.

“Miss Dess,” said Ezra, in the voice of a man going down with a ship, “can I have the curtain?”

“You can, honey, and you can have it in five seconds, and you are going to be sorry for the rest of your natural life.” Odessa did not stop pinning. “Or you can stand there and let it be the least interesting thing that happens in this shop all afternoon. Your call.”

He stood there.

“Good boy,” said Odessa Fontaine, and moved down the line, and Ezra Sandifer stared at his own eyes in that mirror and did not go anywhere.

* * *

“All right,” she said. “Trousers and underwear. I’ll explain why later.”

“All of us?”

“All five, at once, and I mean all at once, because I have to see the five of you standing together or I cannot make you match, and matching is the entire job.” She had the chalk out. “You can each do it one at a time and be the only man in this room for a minute, or you can be a wedding party. It cannot be both.”

Most of them did it in about fifteen seconds, watching each other in the mirror, and the worst thing about a mirror is that you cannot look away from your own face while you are doing a thing like that.

And the truth about five cocks in a mirror is that they do not look like anything you have been led to expect. They look like five completely different animals.

Grady’s hung long and slim and straight down off a body he had plainly spent money on, and he set his weight on one hip so it swung out to the left, because he had been looked at his whole life and had never once been looked at like this.

Sonny was thick even soft, a short heavy handful sitting up on a pair of balls hanging low in the warmth of that room.

Ezra kept staring into his own eyes in the center panel and tried to breathe like a person.

Wyatt just stood there and let the mirror have him, and Georgia Mulcahy looked at the floor and then came straight back up about a second later.

And Huck Lasko had not moved.

* * *

Here is the thing about Huck Lasko, and it is the reason every person in that room had it wrong for three hours.

There was nothing to look at.

He was middling tall and middling everything, narrow through the shoulder, with a chest that had never seen the inside of a gym and a pair of knees that turned in slightly, and a face people forget on the way to the car. He worked at the co-op. He talked too fast when he was nervous, and he had been doing so since two o’clock.

Nobody looks at a man like that and thinks one thing about him.

That is precisely why it had ruined his life. A big man gets the benefit of a rumor. Huck had spent ten years being the one nobody wondered about, and he wasn’t sure what they would say when the truth came out.

He wore two pairs of shorts under his uniform all four years of high school and told the coach it was because he sweat too much.

He still had his hands in his waistband.

“Huck.”

“Ma’am.”

“Look at me and not at that glass.” She said it low, at his elbow, and she did not touch him. “Whatever it is, I have seen it. There is nothing on a man I have not already had a tape on, and you have not brought something new in here.”

“That’s the thing,” he said. “This will be new to the rest of them.”

“All right,” said Odessa. “Then let’s get it over with.”

He got it over with.

* * *

Nobody laughed.

That was the first thing, and it was the loudest thing, and it went through him like a train because he had been braced his entire adult life for the other sound, and the other sound did not come.

It hung most of the way down his thigh, soft, thick through the middle as a woman’s wrist, heavy enough that it moved on its own when he breathed. Off that narrow ordinary body it did not look possible. It looked like something that had been issued to the wrong man.

“You’re kidding me,” said Grady Hennessy.

“Don’t.”

“No, I’m serious. We drove to Panama City together. Four days.”

“Grady.”

“How?”

* * *

And then the women had opinions.

That is what Odessa had been building toward since two o’clock, and it arrived exactly on time, and it was better than anything she had planned.

Because a gasp is nothing, a gasp is over in a second, and a man can tell himself afterward that he imagined it. What none of those five had ever had done to him, and what every woman on that bench had been having done to her since she was about eleven years old, was to stand still while people who are in no hurry at all look at you, form a view, and say it.

“Okay,” said Lacey Vardaman. “I am going first. Grady, I said your pants were a crime, and I withdraw it. Those pants were doing you a favor.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means it is long, honey. It is genuinely long. It is also about as big around as my thumb, and I have been sitting here for ten minutes trying to work out a kind way to say that, and there isn’t one.”

“It is thicker than your thumb,” said Grady Hennessy.

“Hold your thumb up, Lacey,” said Junie, without looking up from her phone.

She held her thumb up.

The whole room looked at the thumb, and then at Grady Hennessy, and then back at the thumb, and Grady Hennessy stood on a raised platform in front of a three-way mirror and watched his own face take it from three angles with nowhere on God’s earth to put it.

“I would still suck it,” Lacey said, generously.

“Thank you.”

“I want to be fair. It is a perfectly suckable one, but it is nothing to ride.”

“Sonny, though,” said Fern Baptiste.

“Sonny,” Lacey agreed, and something in her voice had gone out from under her.

“No. Everybody stop. We are stopping.”

“Sonny, I am sorry, but that is thick.” Fern had sat all the way forward with her elbows on her knees, and she was not being funny anymore. “That is a seriously thick one. That is not a length thing, that is a feel thing. That is the kind that gets in and puts pressure on everything at once, and you are still walking funny on Monday.”

“Can we please not,” said Sonny.

“That is the kind you cannot talk during,” said Fern. “That is the kind where you get about halfway down on it, and your whole body just quits arguing.”

“Junie,” said Sonny, desperately. “Junie, back me up.”

“I am not going to rank them out loud,” said Junie Tackett, with enormous dignity, still writing. “I am going to rank them privately, and I am going to be correct.”

“She has a rubric.”

“I have a rubric, and I will tell you that two of you have already moved and it is not the two you would guess.”

Ezra Sandifer, who was standing there with a full erection he had gotten in a rented jacket just minutes ago and had not lost since, made a small sound.

“That is all I am saying,” said Junie.

Wyatt Trujillo got nothing said about him at all for a good half minute, which he took for a verdict, and then Georgia Mulcahy said, quietly, from the end of the bench, without looking up from the floor:

“That one’s perfect.”

The whole room turned around.

She had not said one word all afternoon, and she did not say another. She went scarlet from the collarbone up and did not take it back, and Wyatt Trujillo found her in the glass and stayed there and did not look away from her again for the rest of the day.

“Well now,” said Odessa Fontaine, to nobody, and wrote nothing down.

* * *

And nobody aside from Grady said anything at all about Huck, which was the loudest part of the entire business.

Four of them had been handled, rated, and argued over within three minutes. The fifth one stood there and got silence, and it went on long enough to become a thing in the room, and he had been waiting on it the whole time the way you wait on a door to slam.

It was Fern who broke it.

“I want everybody to notice that I am not making the joke,” she said. “I could make it. I thought of five of them standing right here, and I am not going to make any one of them.”

“Fern.”

“No, Lacey. He has been standing up there the better part of a minute waiting for one of us to do it. I watched him wait.” She looked straight up at him and did not blink. “Huck. I have been wet since you got your shorts off, and I would like that stated in front of everybody, because you have got about four people in this room being careful with you, and I am not going to be one of them.

“I want it. I do not want to be gentle about wanting it, and I do not want you to be kind to me about it either. I want to find out how much of that I can take, and I want to find out in front of every person here, and then I want to find out again.”

Huck Lasko stood stock-still with his mouth open.

“That,” said Lacey Vardaman, after a moment, “is the filthiest thing anybody has ever said in a place of business.”

“I stand by it.”

“I am not criticizing. I am taking notes.”

“And I will tell you all one more thing,” said Fern Baptiste, “so that everybody in here hears me say it before the tape comes out. She is not going to be able to get her fingers to meet around it. Not close. And the length measurement on that man starts with a nine.”

“Fern.”

“Write it down, Junie. Put the time on it.”

And Sabine Crowder, from the window, who had said perhaps forty words all week, said:

“They are all standing wrong. All five of them. Every one of them is standing like he is waiting to be told something.”

Nobody had an answer for that, because it was true, and because every man on that platform corrected his posture inside of two seconds and hated himself for doing it.

“Gentlemen,” said Odessa, and got out her tape.

* * *

She measured them where they stood, facing the glass, and she did it the way she does a sleeve, which is briskly, twice, out loud.

She had to take hold of each one to do it, because you cannot run a tape along a thing that is moving. So she reached around from behind and took them in her left hand at the base and held them steady, and laid the tape along the top with her right, and she did all of it with exactly the amount of feeling a woman uses on a curtain rod.

And every one of them watched her do it in the mirror.

That was the part none of them had thought about, and it was the part that took the legs out from under them. She was behind them. They could not see her hands by looking down. They had to watch her hands on themselves through a pane of glass from three angles, with four other men doing the same thing on either side.

“Grady. Left. Long is seven even.”

“Seven,” Junie repeated, writing.

“Round is four and a half.”

“What’s round?” said Grady.

“Around, honey. Around the middle of it.” She had the tape on him while she said it, and she pulled it snug and read it off his reflection. “Four and a half.”

She moved along.

“Sonny. Left as well. Long is five and three-quarters.”

Somebody on the bench started to say something, and Lacey turned her head and said, “I will end you,” and it stopped dead.

“Round,” Odessa said, and had to feed the tape around twice to be sure, “is five and five-eighths.”

The room did not immediately understand.

“Would you say that number again?” said Junie.

“Five and five-eighths.”

“That’s more than Grady.”

“It is a full inch more than Grady,” Odessa said, “and it is the number that matters to a tailor, and I am going to explain why in a minute.”

“Ezra. Right side. Long is six and a quarter, round is four and seven eighths.” She patted his hip once, the way you gentle a horse. “That is a good honest set of numbers, sugar, and there is not one thing in this world the matter with it.”

“Thank you,” Ezra said, in a very small voice.

“Wyatt. Left. Long six and three-quarters, round five and a quarter.” She sat back on her heels. “And that is the best pair of numbers on this platform, and somebody in this room ought to hear it out loud.”

Georgia Mulcahy made a sound she was going to think about for the rest of her life.

“And Huck.”

The whole room leaned.

“Huck Lasko,” said Odessa Fontaine, “you are going to have to hold still for me, because I am going to have to do this twice.”

She did it twice.

She had to change hands, and she still could not manage it clean. She held him up out of the way with her left hand around the middle of it and could not get her fingers to meet, and Fern Baptiste said “see,” to nobody in particular, in a voice full of enormous personal vindication.

“Long is nine and a half.”

Nobody said anything at all.

“Round is six and a quarter.”

“Fingers would not meet,” said Fern Baptiste, to the ceiling, “and it starts with a nine. I would like everybody in this room to sit with that for a second.”

“She did call it,” said Junie. “I wrote it down. It has got the time on it.”

“Good Lord,” said Grady.

“Now listen to me,” said Odessa, “because this is the part I actually get paid for.”

She stood up and put the tape around her neck.

“Every man in this world has spent his whole life thinking about the length measurement. That is the number in the jokes. That is the number in the locker room. That is the number a boy measures in a bathroom with a ruler when he is thirteen and then carries around for fifty years like a bad tooth.

“It is the wrong number.

“The long number tells a tailor almost nothing. It tells him where the cloth drapes and whether a man is going to be uncomfortable through a long dinner. That is the whole of what it is good for.

“The round number is what has to be cut for. It is what changes a garment. It is what decides whether a man walks out of my shop looking like himself or looking like he borrowed something off a cousin.”

She turned around to the bench.

“Ladies. I am going to ask you a question, and I want a true answer, because a young man is standing up here who has been carrying the wrong number since he was thirteen years old and I would like to set him straight.”

“Oh, come on,” said Grady Hennessy, who had worked out about four words ahead of everybody else exactly where this was going.

“Which number matters most?” said Odessa.

“Round,” said Lacey, instantly.

“Round,” said Fern.

“Round,” said Junie, “and it is not close, and I have a document.”

“Round,” said Sabine.

And Georgia Mulcahy, who had not said an honest thing in front of a group of people in two years, said, “Round. And I do not want to hear about the other one again as long as I live, from anybody, ever. Nobody has ever once been ruined by a long one.”

Odessa let it sit.

Then she said, “Grady. Come stand in the middle, sugar, where the light is good.”

She turned Grady’s trousers inside out on her arm and read them like a letter, because there was still a job to do and she had every intention of doing it.

“Now look here. They took this in at the seat and let it out at the waist, which means somebody had one pair on a rack and made it fit a number instead of a man. And they have cut you no room at all on the left, which is a problem, because you told me earlier that is where you live.”

She held them up against him without touching him.

“Do you see it?”

He saw it. Everybody saw it. It is impossible not to see once a woman with chalk has pointed at it.

“There is a word for what is missing,” Odessa said, “and the word is accommodation.”

She said it to the whole room, because a fitting is a lesson and always has been, and because she wanted every woman on that bench to have it.

“When a tailor cuts trousers, he cuts room. Room in the seat, room through the thigh, and room on the dress side, because there is something there and it has to go somewhere. A cheap suit is a suit cut by a man who did not ask. That is the entire difference, and it is why your grandfather looked better in a two hundred dollar suit than any of you is ever going to look in a rental.

“I’m good at what I do because I take the time to measure each man and account for the changes that tend to occur.”

“Oh no,” said Grady.

“Oh yes.”

“Oh no.”

“It moves. It moves a great deal, and it does not move the same amount on any two of you, and the man I am cutting for is the one standing at the front of a church in two weeks looking at a stunning woman in a white dress marry his best friend. I will tell you right now, gentlemen, that every last one of you is going to have a moment in that church.”

Nobody breathed.

“So I need you all to get hard. Standing right where you are, in front of that glass, and I am going to cut the cloth to what I find. Use your hand. Use your imagination. Use the five women on that bench who have spent the last hour telling you exactly what they think of you, and who have every one of them, at some point this year, thought about at least one of you while they were alone.”

Lacey said, “Ma’am?”

“Was I wrong?”

“You were not wrong.”

“Then hush.”

* * *

Then she went and got the bowl.

It is a pressing bowl—white enamel, chipped along one side, a blue ring around the rim.

Every tailor has one. You keep water in it at the ironing board and sponge the cloth before you press, and there is not a person alive who would look at it twice.

She has carried that bowl out of nine towns.

She set it on the low stool at the front of the platform, dead center, in front of the mirror, where every one of them could see it in the glass without turning his head.

Fern made a noise like she had been pinched.

“That,” said Odessa, “is where it goes. One rule, and I do not bend it. Nobody finishes without my say. Not on my platform, not on my floor, and not on each other. When it happens, it happens in there, and if you miss, you are going to be the man who missed, and everybody in this room will know it.”

“What do you mean, where it goes,” said Wyatt.

It was the first question Wyatt Trujillo had asked anybody all afternoon.

“You will know it when you see it, honey.”

She pulled her stool over and sat down behind them with her pad on her knee.

“Ladies, you may help. Ask me out loud, in front of everybody, and I will tell you yes or no, and I am going to say yes to very nearly everything.”

“And Ladies,” Odessa said. “Off.”

Junie turned around. “Off what?”

“Clothes off. I need to measure you too. Five gowns in this shop are wrong as well, and that wedding is in two weeks, and I am not doing you at eleven o’clock tonight after I have done them.”

“In front of–”

“In front of the five men you have spent the last hour looking at and passing judgment on out loud, yes.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is not,” said Odessa. “It is a good deal less than what I asked of them, and every woman in this room knows it, and I am going to do it anyway.”

Junie Tackett, who had a folder, had not thought that far ahead, and it was all over her.

“Hang on.”

“Take your time, sugar. That door is still there. It has been there the whole time, and it will be there in an hour.”

Nobody used it.

They went one at a time, and Odessa let it happen that way because five women undressing all at once is a thing that happens in a locker room. Five women doing it one after another, in front of five men who have just been told what will be asked of them and have not yet been let off the platform, is something else entirely.

Lacey first, because of course. She got out of that sundress like she was mad at it and stood there in nothing with her hands on her hips and dared the room, heavy in the chest and soft in the belly and completely unbothered, and Sonny Vantrease said, “oh, that’s not fair,” and Lacey said, “no, it isn’t.”

Fern next, fast and cheerful, no ceremony at all, small and freckled all the way down and already wet enough that she said so. Out loud. A second time.

Then Junie, who took a while, and who kept her chin up the entire time and looked straight at Ezra Sandifer the whole way down. She had a body she had spent her whole life managing, and she stopped managing it in that room. When she stepped out of the dress, she stood with her arms at her sides and let him look, which cost her more than anything else she did that day.

Then Sabine, who did it slowly and with no expression whatsoever, and who was long and pale and dark at the center of herself, and by the halfway point of it there was not one sound anywhere in that building except the radio.

And then Georgia Mulcahy, who had to stand there a good four seconds with her hands on the hem before she could make herself do it, and who then did it, and then stood there with her arms not knowing where to go, and who was the loveliest woman in that room and the only one in it who did not know.

“There,” said Odessa. “Now nobody in here has anything on anybody.”

* * *

She measured them the same way. Fast, twice, out loud, hands where hands have to go.

Bust, taken with the tape across the fullest part, which meant a hand under each of them in turn and the tape pulled snug, and Lacey said “buy me dinner,” and Odessa said “hush” and kept going.

Under the bust, which is the number that actually matters and the one almost no woman alive has ever been told the truth about.

Waist. The full hip, taken at the widest point, which is the number every last one of them had been quietly dreading since the word dress came up in July.

Then she stopped and put the tape down.

“That’s all of it.”

Junie said, “That is not the same.”

“I know it isn’t.”

“You ranked them. You are not going to rank us.”

“No,” said Odessa. “I am not.”

“Why?”

“Because it has been done to you enough.”

The room went very quiet.

“There is not one number I could take off any of you this afternoon that would be news. You have all had your own bodies read back to you your whole lives by people who were not asked to do it, and a tape in my hand is not going to tell a single woman in this shop one thing she has not already been told.”

She wound the tape around her hand.

“But you want it even. So here is what even costs.

“You are going to tell them what you want. Out loud, in this room, the true one, not the one you would say at brunch.

“And I will tell you right now that the first one of you to get up off that bench and say it is going to have the best evening of her entire life.”

Fern Baptiste said, “Oh, that is so much worse.”

“It sure is.”

* * *

“All right, gentlemen. Get to it.”

Nobody moved.

“I know,” said Odessa. “Hold on.”

She went out front and came back with the bottle off her own counter, the big pump bottle of hand lotion that sits by the register because a woman who works with cloth all day has hands like a bricklayer by February.

Then she went down that line and pumped it into each of them, twice, into the open palm, the way you would hand a man his change.

“Hold your hand out.”

“Ma’am–”

“Hold it out, Grady.”

He held it out.

She did all five of them the same way, and she did not hurry, and she did not make a thing of it, and every one of them stood there with a cold handful of it going warm and understood that there was no version of the next few minutes where he was going to get to pretend.

“Now,” said Odessa Fontaine. “Go on.”

* * *

It was the sound that did it.

She had known that for two hundred years, and there had never been one person on this earth she could say it to. A man working himself dry is a man having a private difficulty. A man working himself wet is something else entirely, and it does not go in through anybody’s eyes.

Five slick fists at five different speeds, none of them in time with each other.

That sound came up over the radio inside of thirty seconds, and it filled that back room, and it went into five young women on a bench like a hand around the back of the neck.

Lacey Vardaman stopped talking mid-word.

She had been the loudest person in that building since two o’clock, and she stopped in the middle of a sentence and did not finish it, and she sat forward with her mouth open, and something went out of her face that had been in it her whole life.

Then she said, quietly, to nobody at all, “Oh, I’m in trouble.”

* * *

And the room turned over.

Odessa Fontaine had put her pad down by then and was not writing anything, because she had seen this happen before and she wanted to watch it happen again.

Not in this century. She has been in nine towns, and she has run this in a sorority house and a country club and a locked library, and she has built the thing out of nothing every single time, with a tape and a line and an hour of careful work, the way you build a fire out of wet wood.

She has only twice in two hundred years watched one catch by itself.

Because this is the old thing, this is the thing underneath, and a wedding is the paper they put over the top of it. In two weeks there is going to be a church with flowers in it and a man reading off his phone, and every person in this room is going to stand up in matching clothes and behave, and it is going to be lovely, and it is a costume.

This is what the costume is for.

Five young women who are not attached to anybody and who have all watched a friend get chosen this summer, in a warm room, in front of five stroking cocks, in a building with the door locked.

They were not appraising anymore. Odessa watched the exact minute it stopped being appraisal, and it stopped for all five of them within about forty seconds of each other, and after that there was not a woman in that room who was thinking about a photograph.

They were choosing.

That is the whole business, and it always has been, and she was not going to say one word out loud about it, and she was not going to interrupt it for anything on this earth.

* * *

Lacey got off that bench first, because Lacey Vardaman was never going to be second at anything.

She went straight up onto the platform, stood in front of Sonny Vantrease, and did not ask anybody for permission this time.

“Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“The other one. Give it here.”

He gave her the free one. She turned it over and looked at the palm, which was slick already, and put her mouth flat in the middle of it anyway and licked it all the way up to the fingers, and put it back on him.

“There,” Lacey said. “Now you have more to work with.”

Then she got down on the platform in front of him, on her knees, breasts exposed, on a raised box in front of a mirror, and put her hands on the tops of his thighs and looked up.

“For two years I have been telling everybody in this county that the best thing about you is your mouth. I meant the jokes. I meant that you are funny, and that you get there first so nobody else can, and I want to tell this entire room that I was wrong and that I was wrong the whole time. I had no idea what you had.

“You are going to keep doing that, exactly like that, and I am going to kneel right here and watch it, and I want you to look down at me while you do it.”

“Lacey–”

“Look down at me.”

He looked down at her.

“Say what it is.”

“What?”

“Say what it is. Out loud. You have made a joke about yourself every day since fourth grade, and you are not going to make one now.”

Sonny Vantrease stood on a box in a tailor shop with a woman on her knees in front of him and his fist going and could not find a single joke anywhere in himself.

“It’s thick,” he said.

“It is.”

“It’s really thick.”

“It is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Lacey Vardaman, “and I want you to know that while you’re stroking.”

* * *

Fern Baptiste did not go up on the platform at all.

Fern went down on the floor in front of it, so that Huck Lasko was standing above her, and she sat back on her heels and put her hands flat on her own thighs and looked up at him the way you look up at something in a church.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t you dare stop. I am not going to touch you yet.”

“Fern.”

“I want to look at it. I have been thinking about it for an hour, and I want a while where I am just looking at it.”

So he stood there and worked himself in his own fist above a girl who was kneeling on a tailor shop floor with perky freckled tits and her hands on her thighs, and she watched all of it, and she talked the entire time in a low steady voice that was nothing like her ordinary one.

“That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life.

“I want everybody in here to understand what I am looking at. That is not a joke, not a party trick, and not something to be careful about. That is what it is all supposed to look like.

“I want it in my mouth, and I want it in me, and I do not care in which order, and I do not care who knows it. And I am going to get on that platform in a minute, and you are going to find out that I meant every single word of this.”

Huck Lasko, who had spent ten years making sure no woman ever found out, stood over her with his hand going and made a sound like something coming apart.

“There,” said Fern Baptiste. “That right there is a cock.”

* * *

Sabine Crowder did not go to anybody.

She stayed at that window with her arms folded, let the room come apart in front of her, and watched Grady Hennessy do it.

He was still performing. That was the whole trouble with him, and it had gotten worse, not better, since the thumb: long showy strokes, chin up, playing to the glass, and not one woman in that room had come near him.

Sabine let him find that out on his own. It took him about two minutes.

Then she said, from across the room, not loudly:

“Nobody is coming, Grady.”

He stopped moving.

 

 

“Look around at who’s been picked.” She had not uncrossed her arms. “Two women have crossed the floor to somebody, and not one of them crossed it to you. You have never once had to want anybody, Grady. You have stood still your entire life and let them come to you, and today two came, and they went past you, and now you are standing up there with your hand on yourself finding out what the other side of that feels like.

“Every woman in this shop has known what it feels like since she was about fourteen. You are twenty-six, and this is your first go at it.”

Grady Hennessy stood on that platform with his hand on himself and his face doing nothing at all.

“Ask me,” said Sabine.

“Ask you what.”

“You know what.”

The room had gone quiet on that end. Even Lacey had turned around.

“Sabine,” he said. “Please come over here.”

“Louder. There are people at the other end.”

“Please come over here.”

Sabine Crowder pushed off the window frame, crossed the shop, got up on the box in front of him, and still did not touch him.

“Keep going,” she said. “You do not get my hands yet. You are going to earn those, and it is going to take you the rest of the afternoon.”

* * *

Junie Tackett got the folder out of her bag.

Everybody saw her do it. The room had been full of noise, and it dropped by about half because five women had been hearing about that folder since July, and not one of them had ever gotten past the front page.

Ezra Sandifer was standing there, partially soft, with his hand on himself, watching her.

Junie went up onto the platform and turned the folder around.

“The front page is the rubric,” she said to the room, in a voice that was not entirely steady. “Everybody has seen the front page. Columns, a scoring key, and the whole business. I made it up at a bachelorette party in July because everybody was asking me why I am not seeing anybody and I would rather be the girl with the bit than the girl with the answer.

“It has got nothing to do with today. I didn’t know one thing about today. It is a folder I carry around because I carry everything around.”

She turned the page.

“This is the back page. I wrote it in March, sitting up in my own kitchen at two in the morning after two years of not writing it, and I have read it more times than I am going to admit, and I have never shown it to one living person.”

“Junie–”

“It’s about you, and it’s got your name on it, and it is not funny at all.”

Then Junie Tackett read it out loud.

She read it to a room with nine other people. She did not skip anything, and she did not soften anything, and her voice went at the third line, and she kept going anyway.

It was two paragraphs long, in the second person, and written to him.

It said what she wanted him to do. It started with the black dress and her hands on his collar, and it did not stay there; it went on to be extremely specific about his mouth, where she wanted it, how long she wanted it there, and what she intended to be doing with her hands the whole time. There was a sentence about the sound she expected to make. There was a sentence about what she wanted him to say to her afterward, and that one was the worst of them because it was five words long and not filthy at all.

By the time she got to the end of it, every woman in that shop had stopped what she was doing.

And Ezra Sandifer, who had been standing there soft in his own hand for ten minutes in front of everybody he knows, was hard before she finished the first paragraph.

Junie looked down, saw it happen, and had to put the folder against her chest.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”

“Your sister’s party,” said Ezra.

“I know.”

“Junie, you fixed my collar at your sister’s party two years ago and said something about my tie, and I have not had a clean thought since–”

“I know. Shut up. Keep going. I am going to stand right here and read it to you again.”

She read it to him again.

* * *

And Georgia Mulcahy had not moved the entire time.

She sat on that bench with her arms folded across her stomach and watched every other woman in that room go and get what she wanted. She wanted to go so badly that she had both feet flat on the floor, her heels pushing down. She had spent eleven months of an engagement and two years afterward learning very thoroughly that a woman who wants a thing out loud is the woman everybody ends up feeling sorry for.

Wyatt Trujillo had not made one sound all afternoon.

He had not performed, and he had not narrated, and he had not said a word to anybody, and he was working himself slow and even and controlled with his eyes on hers in the glass, and he had not once looked away.

He had chosen an hour ago. He had been choosing since the parking lot. He was simply going to stand there and go on choosing her until somebody made him stop.

“He is not going to ask you,” Sabine Crowder said. “That is not a thing he can do. He is going to stand up there and want you until he is fifty.”

Georgia said, “I can’t.”

“You can.”

“Every time I have said something out loud about what I want–”

“Then don’t say it,” said Sabine. “Nobody here needs you to say it. Go get on that box.”

Georgia Mulcahy got off that bench like the building was on fire.

* * *

Now here is what a tailor does that nobody else in the world can do, and it is the thing that broke that room open.

She cut the cloth.

Not later, not in the back, not after everybody had gone home. She had them get hard standing on that platform, and while they were, she went along behind them with her chalk and her shears and her basting thread, and she built the accommodation into each man’s trousers on the spot, to his own size, in front of everybody.

And that piece of cloth is a thing you can hold in your hand. It has a width. You can see it from across a room, and it does not care one bit about anybody’s feelings.

She laid Grady’s out first because his was the least of it, a narrow wedge of black wool she cut freehand and held up flat on her palm.

Then Ezra’s, which was near enough the same.

Then Wyatt’s, which was wider. Wyatt looked at it in the mirror, and something happened to his shoulders.

Then Sonny’s.

She had to piece Sonny’s out of two scraps because the first one was not going to do it, and she held the finished thing up beside Grady’s on the same hand so everybody in that shop could see the two of them together, and she did not say one word about it, because she did not need to.

Sonny Vantrease looked at those two pieces of cloth lying side by side on a woman’s palm.

Then he looked at Grady Hennessy in the mirror.

Then he looked for Lacey Vardaman, who was exactly where she had been since she went to him, which was on her knees on that platform at his feet, and she said something up at him that nobody else in the room caught, and Sonny had to face the glass for a second and get his breathing right.

“And Huck’s,” said Odessa.

She did not hold Huck’s up on her hand. She could not. She held it up on both arms, the way you carry firewood, a piece of black wool the size of a dish towel.

Junie Tackett said, quietly, “That’s a napkin.”

“It sure is.”

“That is a full napkin of extra pants.”

“There is going to be a seam up the front of these that I will be putting in by hand until two o’clock in the morning,” said Odessa Fontaine, “and no living soul is ever going to see it, and it is going to be the best work anybody does in this county this year.”

She folded it over her arm.

“Now,” she said. “Where were we?”

And the whole thing went up.

Sabine Crowder had Grady Hennessy on his back on that platform inside a minute.

She did it without hurrying, without asking, without one word of warning, and the fact that he let it happen to him was the first genuinely interesting thing Grady had ever done.

“Hands over your head.”

“What?”

“Over your head. On the floor. Leave them there.”

He put them there.

She got over him and did not put him in.

She sat down on his balls instead, her whole weight on them, and put one hand back against his stomach and left it there, and then she ground down and forward and back, slow, using him, wet all the way up the underside of him and not once letting him inside her.

He could feel every bit of how wet she was and exactly how close it was to where he needed it, and he could feel her weight sitting on the two most defenseless things he owns, and he could not do one thing about any of it. She watched his face the whole time with nothing at all on her own.

“You are going to want to move your hips.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t.”

He didn’t. It took everything in him, and everybody could see it.

“There it is,” said Sabine Crowder. “That is the first time in your life you have ever had to try for anything.”

“Sabine.”

“You want to be inside me.”

“Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

“I want to be inside you.”

“No. Properly.”

“I want to fuck you. Please. Please let me.”

“See how that sounded coming out of you,” she said. “Hold onto that.”

She reached back and took hold of him and set him and came down on it slow, all the way, and stopped there with her weight full on him.

Grady Hennessy made a noise that turned the whole room, and Lacey looked over and said, “Oh, so that’s what he sounds like,” and went back to what she was doing.

Sabine rode him in reverse with her hair down and her face perfectly calm, and every time his breathing changed she stopped. Not slowed and stopped, dead, sitting on him full to the base, going absolutely nowhere, until it came back down.

She did that four times.

By the fourth one, he had his hands still over his head as she told him, and he was begging, out loud, in a room with nine other people in it.

“Please. Sabine. Please.”

“Say the number.”

“What number?”

“You know the number.”

“Four and a half.”

“Again.”

“Four and a half. It’s four and a half.”

“Now say it like it doesn’t cost you anything.”

“Four and a half,” said Grady Hennessy, “and it’s fine.”

“It is fine,” said Sabine, and spun around, and leaned down and kissed him for the first time, and it was by a long way the kindest thing anybody did to anybody in that room all afternoon.

She fucked him properly after that, both hands braced on his chest, taking her time, and she came on him with her head down and her hair over both their faces and her whole body locked. She did it almost silently, and the only way anybody knew was that she stopped talking mid-sentence and did not finish it for a full minute.

Then she sat up, still on him, still full of him.

“You’re not finishing,” she said.

“Sabine.”

“Not yet. Not for a while.”

* * *

Sonny Vantrease talked the entire time.

That is the thing nobody could have told Lacey Vardaman in advance, and it is the thing she had been after for two years without knowing it. The mouth she had been commenting on all that time turned out to be worth something after all.

He got Lacey up on the arm of the sofa, knelt in front of her, and told her in detail, in a completely level voice, what he was about to do before he did it.

Then he did it.

He put his mouth on her and worked her open with his tongue and did not rush one second of it.

“You have got your hand in my hair,” he said.

“I know I’ve got my hand in your hair.”

He got two fingers in her and kept his mouth where it was and told her, muffled, exactly how wet her cunt was and exactly what it was doing on his hand, out loud, in front of every person she had gone to high school with.

“You should hear yourself,” he said.

“Sonny.”

“No, listen to it. That’s you. That is the sound of you soaking my whole face.”

Lacey Vardaman came on the arm of a sofa in a tailor shop with her heels off the floor and both hands in a man’s hair, loudly, at length, in front of everyone.

When she got her eyes open, she said, “Do that again.”

“In a minute.”

“No.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sonny, and did it again, and the second one bent her double.

When she finally got him up onto that sofa and got a knee either side of him and reached down and lined him up, she sank about a third of the way and stopped cold.

“Oh,” Lacey said. “Oh, that is the round number.”

“That’s the round number.”

“That is what the round number means.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Every short joke anybody in this town ever made about you,” Lacey said, “was made by somebody who did not know.” She was working herself down on him in short pushes, taking it in stages, and her voice had gone thin. “God. Sonny. You are so thick I can’t.”

“Say it louder. Grady’s right there.”

“Shut up. No. Don’t shut up. Talk.”

So he talked.

He talked her all the way down onto it, and he talked her through the first four minutes of it. He told her what she was doing to him and what she looked like from underneath, and Lacey Vardaman, who had built a personality out of having the loudest mouth in the county, could not put four words together in a row.

* * *

Fern Baptiste and Huck Lasko took the longest, and were the most careful, and were the most watched.

She got him down on the fitting room floor on a pile of muslin and used both hands exactly the way she had asked to, and she took her time about it, and she said every single thing she was thinking out loud because she does not know another way to be.

“Okay, so I genuinely cannot get my fingers to touch around your cock.”

“Yeah.”

“That is an insane thing to have on your body. That is not a normal thing for a person to be walking around town with.” She bent down and put her mouth on the head of it and got maybe a third of the way and came off wet. “Okay. That’s about as far as that goes. That is fine. That is information.”

“You don’t have to–”

“Huck. Sweetheart. I am having the best day of my life. Please stop trying to hand me an exit.”

She went back down on it anyway and worked what she could with her mouth and the rest with both fists, and she got him leaking on her tongue inside of two minutes, and she said so, and the fact that she said so nearly ended him right there.

Then she got up over him.

She had to line it up with one hand and hold herself open with the other, and it still took her three tries to get the head of it in. When it went, she said “oh f–” and did not get to the end of the word.

“Do not move,” Fern said. She had one palm flat on his stomach and her whole weight on it. “Don’t you dare move. I am getting there.”

“I’m not moving.”

“I know you’re not. You haven’t moved in ten minutes. You’re being so good.”

Huck Lasko, who wore two pairs of shorts under his uniform for four years, who taught himself at fourteen how to sit down in a way that would not start a conversation, who had ended two relationships early so it would never have to come up, lay on his back on a pile of muslin on the floor of a tailor shop and was told by a naked girl that he was being so good.

She worked it into herself an inch at a time over what must have been five minutes, and she talked the whole way, and she was not quiet.

“That is so much. That is so much. Okay. Okay.”

“Fern–”

“I’ve got it.”

She got about two-thirds of it, then stopped, put her forehead down on his chest, and breathed.

“That’s it,” she said. “That is everything I have got. My whole self, right there, and there is still a fist of you left over.”

“That’s plenty.”

“That is more than plenty. That is a public safety issue.” She got her forehead off his chest and looked down at him, wrecked and delighted. “I am so full of you I can feel it when I breathe.”

Then she rode what she had, with her hand braced at the base of him so nothing went anywhere she had not agreed to, and it was plenty, and she came the first time in about ninety seconds and did not stop moving through it, and the second one took her four minutes and shook her arms out from under her.

* * *

Junie Tackett did not let Ezra Sandifer do a thing for the first ten minutes.

“Lie down.”

“Junie–”

“You are going to get it wrong, and I want you to get it wrong later, when it does not matter.” She got a knee on either side of him. “Right now you are going to lie there and let me, because two years of both of us being careful is enough, and if either one of us tries to be smooth about this, we will ruin it.”

“Read me the last line again.”

She stopped.

“You want the last line.”

“I want the last line.”

Junie Tackett put her face down in his neck and said the five words into it, and she did not have to look at the page to do it, and neither of them had ever needed the other four hundred words at all.

“I knew what you were writing,” Ezra said, into her hair. “I did not know it was about me. I want you to understand that is the only part I got wrong.”

Then she sat up and reached back and put him in and rode him hard enough to walk the sofa across the floor.

He lasted exactly two minutes before he had to grab her hip and say her name in a way that meant something.

“No. No. Not yet, look at me.”

He looked at her.

“Look at me and hold it.”

He held it. The effort went through him from his jaw to his feet, and she watched every bit of it happen and put both hands flat on his chest and rode him right through the worst of it.

“Good,” Junie said. “There. You see? You are already better at this than the smooth ones, and you don’t have the first idea why.”

* * *

And Georgia Mulcahy did not say one word for a very long time.

Wyatt Trujillo did not either.

He got her up against the wall by the pressing table with her legs around him and one forearm under her and his other hand flat on the wall by her head, and he fucked her slow and deep and completely without commentary, and he did not stop looking at her once.

That was the entire thing. He would not stop looking at her.

She kept trying to look away, and he kept waiting, and every time she came back he was still there, and around the fourth or fifth time she gave up and started crying a little, in the good way, and he still did not say anything, and he still did not stop.

He got her off against that wall without ever changing his pace, which is a thing a certain kind of quiet man can do and nobody else can, and she was loud about it, and it surprised everybody in that room including her.

“Say something,” she finally said. “Please say something.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No.” He got a better grip under her and started again. “You have had two years of people talking at you.”

Georgia Mulcahy put both hands in his hair and said, into his mouth, the true thing she had not been able to say to the room:

“I want to be wanted by somebody who is not going to change his mind.”

“Okay,” said Wyatt Trujillo, and that was the whole of it.

That is all he said, and it did the job, and she went off a second time about a minute later with her heels locked at the small of his back.

* * *

And through the whole of it, Odessa Fontaine kept working.

That is the part every one of them told at parties afterward for the rest of their lives, and never once got anybody to believe.

She had a wedding in two weeks.

She went around that back room with her pins, her chalk, and her pad, and she did not stop. She got Grady’s seat measurement off him while he was flat on his back with Sabine Crowder sitting on him full depth, by lifting his knee and saying “hold still” in the same voice she uses at the counter about a stuck zipper. She chalked the drop on Wyatt’s trouser, kneeling beside the pressing table while he had Georgia up against the wall, a foot from her head, marking cloth, not looking up.

She stood over Fern and Huck on the fitting room floor with the tape in her hand.

“Sugar. When you get a chance, I am going to need him standing up for about forty seconds.”

“Right now?”

“When you get a chance.”

“Ma’am, respectfully, absolutely not.”

“That’s fine, honey. I’ll come back.”

She came back.

And she came through with the actual bridesmaid gown over her arm and stood at the end of the sofa and waited for a gap in the proceedings, and did not get one, and asked anyway.

“Junie. I need this on you for about a minute.”

“Now?”

“The hem is the only thing left on you, and I would rather not do it at midnight.”

So Junie Tackett put on a bridesmaid dress in that back room, on top of Ezra Sandifer, pulled it down over the pair of them, got her arms through it, and never once stopped what she was doing, and Odessa knelt beside them and pinned the hem.

“Is this the one that’s too long?”

“It sure is.”

“Well, do it now, then. I am not getting back into this thing tonight.”

“Hold still, then.”

“I am.”

“You are not.”

“I’m doing my best!”

“Do better, sugar. I have got four more of these.”

* * *

She let it run a good while longer than she needed to, because it was worth watching and because she has never once been in a hurry.

Then she went and stood by the low stool at the front of the platform with her hand resting on the rim of that white enamel bowl, and she did not say anything at all, and one by one they noticed her standing there.

The room came down in stages, the way it does.

“Gentlemen,” said Odessa Fontaine. “You have all been very good, and not one of you has finished, and I have watched every one of you not do it, and I want you to know that I noticed.

“Now bring it here.”

* * *

It took a while, and it went in a cascade, the way it always does.

The women brought them.

Nobody planned that. Nobody suggested it. Odessa did not say one word to make it happen, and it happened anyway, and it is the reason she has thought about that Tuesday more often than she has thought about most of the last fifty years.

Fern Baptiste walked Huck Lasko to that bowl with both hands still on him and got down on her knees in front of it and finished him herself.

It took her about forty seconds once she got serious, and then it went on and on and on.

The first rope of it hit the enamel hard enough to hear from across the room. The second one went in on top of it. There was so much of it coming out of him that Lacey said, “Is he all right?” genuinely worried, and Fern did not answer her and did not stop, and worked the rest of it out of him in long pulls with both fists until there was nothing left in him to get.

Then she sat back on her heels with her chin wet and her wrist wet and a stripe of it up her forearm, and looked over her shoulder at the room, in a voice full of enormous personal vindication:

“Fingers would not meet,” said Fern Baptiste, over her shoulder, to the whole room. “Starts with a nine. I called every bit of it before that tape came out of her pocket and not one of you believed me.”

Then she wiped two fingers up her own arm, put them in her mouth, and sucked them clean, because she is Fern, and Huck Lasko had to sit down on the floor.

Lacey Vardaman brought Sonny and did not stop talking once the entire way. She told him what he looked like. She told him what he sounded like. She told him, into his ear, in specifics, exactly what she intended to do to him the night of the reception, and she was on the fourth or fifth specific when he lost the thread entirely and went over the rim of that bowl with both hands in her hair.

“Look at that,” Lacey said, watching it go over the rim. “Look what I did. Look how much of that is mine.”

Junie Tackett brought Ezra Sandifer with one hand and her mouth and made him look at her the whole time, the way he had looked at her at her sister’s party two years earlier and never said anything about. She took him to the edge of the bowl and let him go there, and afterward she held onto him a while, and neither one of them said one word.

Georgia Mulcahy and Wyatt Trujillo came to it together. She went with him and put her hand over his hand and got him there without a syllable out of either of them, and when he was done she said, very quietly, “don’t change your mind,” and Wyatt Trujillo said, “I’m not going to,” and that was the end of that conversation forever.

And Sabine Crowder took Grady Hennessy by the cock and walked him the length of that shop with it.

She did not grip him hard, and she did not stroke him. She closed her hand around him just behind the head and set off, and he came along, because there is not a man alive who does not come along, and she did not once look back to see whether he was following.

Nobody in that room said one word about it. They all watched him cross his own friends’ line of sight on the end of a woman’s hand, and the only sound was Lacey Vardaman putting her drink down.

Sabine made him stand over the bowl with his hands behind his back, and she did all of it herself, and she took him to the edge four separate times and stopped, and by the last one he was making a sound like something with its leg in a trap, and every person in that room had quit what they were doing to watch.

She leaned up and put her mouth against his ear and said, not quietly enough, so that the front half of that room got it:

“Four and a half. Say thank you.”

“Thank you,” said Grady Hennessy.

Then she finished him, hard, with her wrist turned, and Grady Hennessy came so violently that he had to put a hand out on the mirror to stay on his feet, and he left a print on that glass at chest height that Odessa left right where it was for a good while before she cleaned it off.

“Good,” said Sabine Crowder, and let go of him, and wiped her hand on his shirt.

Not one of them missed that bowl, and not one of them had been told twice.

She gave up wondering about that in another century.

* * *

They left at seven, loud, in a heap, half of them in the wrong shoes.

Patrice Mabry got a text from the maid of honor at four minutes past seven that said only the fittings went great, and then a second one, ninety seconds later, that said Do not ever ask me anything about this.

Sabine Crowder was the last one out, and she stopped in the doorway with her bag on her shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“For what, sugar?”

“You know.”

“I put you in a dress, and I took a number off your hip,” Odessa said. “Go on home.”

Sabine looked at her a second longer than anybody in that town had ever looked at her.

Then she went on home.

* * *

Odessa locked the front and turned off the sign and swept up the butterscotch.

Then she carried the pressing bowl into the back, set it on the cutting table under the good light, and went and turned that light off because she wanted the other one.

The streetlight on the square comes through the front window and lays a long yellow shape down the whole length of that shop and up onto the end of that table. It has been doing that every night since she took the place. She has worked by it before, when the hour got stupid, and she did not want to admit she was still there.

She got out of her dress and everything under it, left it all on the floor where it landed, which she never does, and did not give it a thought.

Then she stood in the middle of her own shop with nothing on and took her time about it, because there was nobody in that building, nobody above her, and nobody within four blocks, and it had been a very long while since all three of those were true at once.

That is the thing about this one that nobody would guess and that she noticed standing right there.

In a sorority house there are girls over your head. In a club there is a night man. In a rented kitchen with the window standing open there is a whole party going on the other side of a fence, and somebody liable to walk up and holler through the screen at you about ice.

She had spent two hundred years being quiet.

Tonight there was a locked front door, a dark square, and a shop she paid for, and not one living soul who could hear a thing she did.

Odessa Fontaine looked at that for a second and understood that she was about to have a completely different kind of evening.

* * *

She looked herself over in the long mirror while she thought about it, the way you look at a tool before you pick it up.

She is heavy in the chest and has been since she was a girl, in the days when that was a problem and a woman got talked about for it, and she outlived every person who ever had an opinion. They sit low now. They have sat low for a hundred and some years, and she has never once wanted them anywhere else.

Wide through the hip and with a belly curve she has never taken off, she would not know what to do with the space if she did. A long back. Heavy thighs that still hold, and a good deal of her behind, and the whole of it going a soft gold in the light off that streetlight, and the dark hair down her back nearly to the small of it.

She stood there with her weight on one hip, looked at all of that, and thought what she has thought about it since she was a young woman in another century: she would not trade with anybody.

She has been in the same body a very long time. That is a thing she has never been able to explain to anybody and has never had to. It is not vanity, which is a young woman’s condition and burns off. It is closer to what a woman feels about a house she built herself, has kept up, and is not going to sell.

She likes it. She has always liked it. She has liked it in nine towns and through many wars, and she has never once in all of that had another living creature who could be told so.

* * *

She climbed up onto her own cutting table.

It is oak, and it is enormous, and it has been in that back room longer than she has, and she has spread ten thousand yards of cloth on it and never once lain down on it in her life.

She lay down on it now, flat on her back on the bare wood, with the bowl beside her hip where she could get at it without looking.

Above her was a pressed tin ceiling. To her right, across the room, was the three-way mirror on its platform, and from where she was she could see herself in it sideways and in pieces, the length of one thigh and the side of her chest and one arm, three times over, at three angles.

She reached over, put her whole hand into that bowl, and brought it up full.

* * *

There was so much of it.

That is the fact of this one, and it changed the whole character of the thing. Five of them, and two had gone off like a fire hose, filling the bottom half of that enamel, and it was still warm off the room it was made in.

Every other time in two centuries she has had to be careful. You get what you get out of a night, and you decide where it goes, and you put it where it will do the most good, and you go without everywhere else. She has spent two hundred years rationing.

She did not ration.

She poured the first double handful straight onto her chest from about a foot up and let it run.

It came down thick and slow and hot and went everywhere at once, down the middle of her and out over both sides, and she got both hands into it and pushed it around, and the sound of that in an empty shop was obscene, and she laughed out loud at it, once, into a dark room.

Then she stopped laughing, because it started going in.

* * *

Hope goes in fast.

That was the second surprise, and it came close to getting away from her. Boys’ striving takes work to push in. What she had gotten out of the Arbor Club sat on her like cold wax and had to be forced. This went through her skin like whiskey on an empty stomach, greedy, all at once, wanting all of her at the same time, and inside of a minute she had gone light in the head and had to put a hand flat on the table.

So she slowed it down on purpose.

That is a thing she can do now and could not do in June, and she did it lying on her back on a table with her hand between her own breasts, holding the whole of it at a simmer, deciding where it was allowed to go and how fast.

Then she worked it in properly, and she took an hour over something that has never once taken her more than fifteen minutes.

She did her breasts first and did them thoroughly. Both hands underneath, taking the whole weight of them up off her ribs and holding them there while she worked it into the thin skin below, then over the top and out to both sides. She got her palms flat and went in slow circles and watched what her own chest did under her hands in the mirror across the room, sideways, and had to stop for a second.

Her nipples came up hard and stayed hard the entire time. She pulled on them with slick fingers and rolled them and pulled harder, and she has known since a house in Charleston that she can very nearly get all the way there off that alone if she is patient, and she was patient.

She did her throat with her chin up and both hands flat, all the way to the jaw on both sides.

She did her stomach and the whole curve of her belly with the flats of her palms in long strokes, and she took a fresh handful for that, not making it stretch.

She sat up enough to do her back and her sides and everywhere she could reach, and got the last of what was on her hands into her thighs, and she did the insides of them last, and by then she was not being clinical about it and had stopped pretending she was.

* * *

And she thought about where all of it came from, because that is the half that does the actual work, and because she wanted to.

She thought about Huck Lasko while she had both hands full over her heart, and about a boy who had spent ten years making sure nobody ever found out, and about a boy standing on her platform in front of a lit mirror hearing a room full of women decline, one after another, to make the joke. Most of what was on her chest was his. She knew that for a fact because there had been nothing like it in that bowl before Fern Baptiste knelt.

She thought about Grady Hennessy embarrassed in front of everybody he had ever known.

She thought about Sonny Vantrease watching two pieces of black wool lie side by side on her palm, his and the best-looking man in the county’s, and understanding what he had been carrying around all this time, and not saying one word about it in front of anybody.

She thought about the sound the enamel made. She thought about it a good while.

And she thought about Fern Baptiste sitting back on her heels with her chin wet and her wrist wet, looking over her shoulder at a whole room of people to tell them she had called it.

Odessa Fontaine lay on her own cutting table covered to the thighs in five young men and thought about that girl’s face, and put her hand back in the bowl, and got what was left of it, and took it down between her legs.

* * *

She was already wet before her hand ever got down there. What was on the hand was not hers at all; she mixed the two without thinking twice.

She laid two fingers flat and left them there without moving, only bearing down, until everything under them woke up and started answering.

Then she used the whole flat of her hand and dragged everything up together, slow, from the bottom all the way to the top, spreading what was on her fingers into herself as she went, and she got her hips up off that table doing it.

She put her heels on the edge of the table and let her knees fall open, because there was nobody, and because she wanted to be open, and because she could see one thigh of herself in the mirror across the room and that was somehow worse and better than seeing all of it.

She got her thumb up, pushed back off the top of everything, and held it there so nothing was covered.

Then she went at it with two fingers inside herself and the heel of the same hand working outside, and the other hand still up on her own chest keeping the working going, and she did not do it slow and careful the way she did it at a kitchen sink in June with her jaw locked.

She did it hard.

She got loud almost immediately, and the sound of her own voice in that empty shop went through her worse than her own hand did. She has not heard herself in a room in longer than she can put a number to. She said things out loud on that table that she has never said in front of another person in two hundred years, some of it in English and a good deal of it not, and some of it was about a girl kneeling in front of a bowl, and some of it was about a girl kneeling on a shop floor telling a boy she was not going to be gentle about wanting him, and one long stretch of it was about nothing and nobody and was not words at all.

She came the first time with three fingers in and her back off the wood and her free hand clamped down on her own breast hard enough to leave marks she would find in the morning, and she did not go quiet through it, and she did not hold still.

She did not stop afterward either.

That is the other thing she had never once had. There has always been a house to get back to, or a party going a fence away, or a girl asleep on a sofa, and she has always finished, washed, and gone to bed.

She lay on that table in the dark with her heart going and both hands still on herself and thought, no, I don’t believe I will, and started over.

The second one took her a good deal longer and came up out of somewhere lower and went on so long that she lost the working entirely and had to reach back into the bowl afterward and pick it up where she had dropped it.

The third one she went and got on purpose, out of pure appetite, with the last of what was in that bowl on both hands and one of them full of her own breast, and it was the best of the three. She was not remotely quiet about it, and there was not one soul in four blocks to hear a two hundred year old woman come apart on a table in an alterations shop with a wedding party’s worth of hope going into her skin.

* * *

Then it did the rest of what it does.

It went for the knee first and took the whole thing out clean. It went into both wrists and every worn place a hundred years of pins and tape and pressing irons had quietly filed away. It got up into her shoulders and set right a thing she had been carrying so long she had quit calling it anything.

And then it kept going, because there was twice as much of it as there had any business being, and it went straight up for her face the way water finds the low place in a floor.

She had been waiting for that since four in the afternoon.

Odessa Fontaine put her foot down on it.

She did it flat on her back with both hands still slick on her own body, and it was the second time in her life she had ever done it, and June had been one summer afternoon out of two men, and this was five of them and every one of them full to the back teeth.

It fought her.

It went for the grey at her temples, and she let it have that, because she buys the grey out of a box and can put it back. Then it went for her mouth, and she stopped it. Then it went under her eyes, which is where a face gives itself away first, and stopping that took her a full minute and left her sweating on the wood.

Then she took everything that was left, all of it, everything it had not been allowed to spend, and she sent it into her hands.

Both of them. Down through the wrists and the palms and out into all ten fingers. Every joint, every knuckle, every small used-up place in a pair of hands that have been holding a needle since before there was a town on that square.

In June it had gone to her hands by itself, and she had stood at a sink and found out what she had. Tonight she put it there.

Nobody on this earth can look at a woman’s knuckles across a counter and tell you one single thing about her.

It went in and in and did not stop for a long time, and when it finally quit, her hands were so warm she could feel her own pulse all the way out in the fingertips.

* * *

She lay there a while after.

The bowl emptied itself beside her hip the way it always does. Her skin took the last of what was on her, all of it, off her chest and her belly and the insides of both thighs, until there was not a mark or a smear or a smell left anywhere on that table to say what had gone on there.

She got up eventually and stood in the yellow off the streetlight and had a look at herself in the long mirror.

The grey was gone at both temples. Her mouth was her own mouth. The skin under her eyes was the same the man at the pharmacy nods at every morning on his way in. Patrice Mabry would be through that door about the sash before the week was out. Not one person in that town was ever going to know a thing.

Then Odessa Fontaine flexed both hands open and shut, twice, and looked at them, and made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.

“Well,” she said, to a room with nobody in it. “That’s better.”

* * *

She worked until four.

That is not a flourish. There were ten garments in that shop and a wedding coming, and she had told Patrice she would fix them, and she does not say things she does not mean.

She rebuilt the back of the jacket. She let out two seats and took in three. She opened the whole front of Huck Lasko’s trousers. She set a gusset in by hand, with the good thread, small stitches, sitting under the lamp at four in the morning with a pair of hands that were never going to ache again as long as she had them, sewing a seam not one living person was ever going to see.

Then she hung all ten of them on the rack by the door with the tags on, and put the pressing bowl back on its shelf, and locked up, and drove the truck four blocks home.

* * *

The wedding was fine.

It was warm for October, and it went on too long, and the officiant read something off his phone.

All five of the men had a moment in that church, exactly as she had told them they would, and every one of them got through it without incident, because the cloth had been cut by somebody who measured.

Junie Tackett cried the whole way through the ceremony and held Ezra Sandifer’s hand where everybody could see it. Lacey and Sonny left the reception before nine and were not subtle about leaving. Georgia Mulcahy danced with Wyatt Trujillo for two hours, and he did not say fifty words all night, and she looked happier than anybody in that room, including the bride. Fern Baptiste got Huck Lasko out on the floor for a slow one and put her face flat against his chest and stayed there through two more.

Sabine Crowder sat at the head table with her chin on her hand, and every so often Grady Hennessy would look down the table at her, and she would not look back, and he would sit up straighter in his chair.

Marcy Mabry threw the flowers directly at Georgia Mulcahy without any pretense whatsoever of throwing them anywhere else, and got exactly the reaction she had been after since July.

* * *

Patrice Mabry found Odessa by the cake table around ten.

She stood there for a minute without saying anything, which, for Patrice, is remarkable, and looked down at the floor.

“Look at all of them.”

“I am looking.”

“Junie Tackett has been in love with that boy since her sister’s party, and I have watched it for two years, and I have wanted to shake her.” Patrice had her arms folded. “And Georgia. That poor girl has not put her head up since the thing with what’s his name. She has got her head up.”

“She sure does.”

“Dess.”

“Patrice.”

“Whatever happened in that shop?” Patrice Mabry did not turn around. “I am not asking. I want you to notice that I am still not asking. I have gone four months without asking, and it is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”

“I have noticed.”

“Was it good for you too?”

Odessa Fontaine laughed out loud, once, into her cake.

“Sugar,” she said, “you have no idea.”

“That’s all I wanted.” Patrice picked her drink back up. “Now. My cousin’s girl is getting married in the spring, and I have already told her about you, so brace up.”

She went off toward the floor. Then she came back.

“And Dess. Your hair looks incredible tonight.”

“It’s the light in here.”

“It is not the light in here,” said Patrice Mabry, and went to go dance with her husband.

* * *

She stayed until the band quit.

Then she went out to the lot for the air, and stood by her truck in a good dress with her keys in her hand, and did the thing she has done in nine towns on nine nights like this one.

She started the count.

That is the oldest habit she has. You stand outside a party in a town you like. You work out how many years you have got left in it before somebody at the pharmacy notices that you have not changed, and then you work out what the story will be when you go, and whether it is a bad flu in December or a letter to somebody at six in the morning.

She got to about two before she noticed she had stopped.

And that she had stopped some while ago, in a back yard in June, with her foot down on a thing that had been running her for two hundred years.

There won’t be a count anymore. She settled that in Delia Ruffin’s kitchen with her heart going and both hands flat on a counter, and she has not gone back on it since, and she was not about to go back on it in a parking lot in October.

She was going to open that shop Monday at nine.

Patrice’s cousin’s girl is in the spring. Junie Tackett will be in that shop inside two years, and both of them know it. There is a christening gown in the back room that was hanging there the day she took the shop, and somebody is going to want it eventually, and it is going to be one of these.

Odessa Fontaine flexed her hands around her keys, both of them, all ten fingers, warm as bread.

Then she got in the truck and drove four blocks home past the shop with its dark front window and its long yellow shape on the floor.

Saturday is at Delia’s.

 

The End.

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