I stared at this boy I had watched grow up two houses down. Seventeen years old. Bitten fingernails. Holding a notebook like it was a contract.
“Eli, you have never made a dress like this in your life.”
That night, I stood at my kitchen window and watched the light in Eli’s bedroom burn long past three in the morning.
“No, ma’am. I haven’t.”
“Then how—”
“I just need you to say yes.”
I almost said no. I had every reason. But there was something in his eyes that did not belong to a seventeen-year-old. Something steadier than I had felt in a year.
“Yes,” I whispered.
That night, I stood at my kitchen window and watched the light in Eli’s bedroom burn long past three in the morning, and I wondered what on earth I had just agreed to.
His mother called me on day three.
The light in Eli’s bedroom window became my new clock.
Past midnight, past two, past three. Some nights I stood at my kitchen sink and watched it burn while the rest of the street slept.
His mother called me on day three.
“Mave, his fingers are sore,” she said. “I wrapped them in cold bandages, and he unwrapped them. He missed a chemistry test.”
“Should I stop him?”
“I don’t think anything could,” she said quietly. “He’s been at that machine since he could reach the pedal. You know that.”
Two weeks felt impossible.
I did know. I had watched her hem my curtains while Eli, six years old, fed her pins from a magnetic dish and asked why the thread had a number. By ten, he was sketching dresses in the margins of his spelling homework. By thirteen, he was altering his own jackets on her old Singer.
I hung up and pressed my forehead against the cool window.
Two weeks felt impossible. Two weeks felt like a countdown to another disappointment I would have to absorb for my daughter.
Meanwhile, Hazel sank.
