Yukie

A tailor I used every few decades worked in a city I reached when the road bent that way. He cut me a winter coat the first time: plain wool, the kind nobody looks at twice. The second time, he left the tape on my shoulder longer than the measurement needed, like a man listening to a wall.

Between visits, fashions died and were born again; he kept one of each, the way I keep cities. My coat always fit. Once, pins in his mouth: “You hold yourself the same as when I met you. That's no business of mine.” Then he wrote down the same numbers as the first time.

He died in a bad spring. I heard too late. The shop passed to his daughter, who looked at me once and then not again, which at her age was courtesy. In the back hung a coat set apart, with his paper tag: my old name in that city, the only name he knew. She said he cut it the last time I left. “He said not to sell it. He said you would come back, unchanged, and I was not to stare.”

It fit. I paid what it was worth; she wanted nothing, but shops do not live on sentiment, and I do not let my debts die with their creditors.

I wear it still. Down the lining, in ink gone brown, the numbers he took the first time. Still correct.

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