It lasted a moment then Rod Laver and someone else got up and the match resumed. But there could be no mistake. They were my father’s t-shirts. I screamed, but only because I’d pricked myself, but I think I would have screamed anyway.
I ran down the stairs to the shop three at a time to tell my father and Faivish. Grinning like the loon he was, Faivish clapped his hands, stepping from foot to foot excitedly. My father, however, did not react as I expected, his eyes darting from side to side in rapid, feverish thought, his head slowly nodding.
“Good,” he said quietly, rubbing his hands together, “good”.
I slunk back upstairs to work on the pants, one step at a time, not quite sure of what I had started.
* * *
Over the next fortnight we sold twenty more t-shirts, six of them at the higher price. My father was spending less and less time in the shop, disappearing without explanation or information as to his whereabouts or time of return. I was having to become adept at apologizing for his absence and taking note of the more complex alterations.
Some customers were visibly uncomfortable at having a teenage girl nip and tuck and pin the first drafts of my father’s creations as they stood there wearing them, arms outstretched. It wasn’t a job that I should have been doing, but without knowing when my father would return, I could hardly send customers back out onto the street. I tried to be as professional and discreet as possible, pulling at the cloth, pinching it just so, but I didn’t always get it right the first time, and sometimes even managed to pin flesh to fabric.
“You always tell me that I know more than I think I do,” I told my father one evening after admitting that I had chalked the first cut of a new suit of a particularly demanding customer.
“You do,” my mother called out from buttering a chicken.
“But you should do it when I’m there,” my father protested across the dining table.
“But you’re never there. We don’t know where you are. But what I do know is that we’ll lose business if we carry on this way.”