Take It In
Content notes: death
Teo Barrera took over his uncle’s alterations shop the spring he turned thirty-one, mostly because nobody else in the family could thread a machine. The shop was a narrow room in a strip center on Pacific Avenue in Stockton, between a vape store and a place that did eyebrows. It had a counter, three Juki machines, a pressing table, a curtained fitting booth, and a rack of finished work hanging under dry-cleaner plastic with paper tags pinned to the shoulders. His uncle Rafa had run it for twenty-six years and still came in on Saturdays to sit by the window and criticize.
The work was hems, mostly. Wedding dresses in May. Prom in April. Men who had lost weight on a new diet and wanted every pair of pants they owned taken in two inches, and then came back in October wanting it let out again.
The man with the navy suit came in on a Tuesday in early September. He was old, and very neat, in a tan windbreaker zipped to the throat. He laid the suit across the counter like he was laying down a sleeping child. It was a good suit. Wool, half-canvassed, the kind of thing a department store sold in 1975 to men who planned to wear it to every funeral for the rest of their lives.
“I need this taken in,” he said, and put an index card on top of it.
Teo was used to customers who wanted to skip the fitting. He started his speech about how he really needed to see it on the person, and the old man said, “He can’t come in,” in a way that ended the speech. The card was written in blue ballpoint, careful and square. Chest 39. Waist 34. Seat 40. Sleeve 24½. Inseam 30. It was signed at the bottom, for him, D. Halloran.
The measurements were about two sizes smaller than the suit. Ordinary work. Teo wrote up a ticket, quoted ninety dollars, and said Friday.
“Tuesday’s fine,” said Mr. Halloran. “I’ll be back Tuesday.”
He was back Tuesday. He paid in cash, looked at the jacket on its hanger without trying to touch it, and then, instead of taking it, he put a new card on the counter.
Chest 37. Waist 31. Seat 37. Sleeve 24. Inseam 29½.
“He’s lost some,” Mr. Halloran said.
Teo understood then, or thought he did. Somebody in a hospital bed, somewhere. A son or a brother, getting smaller every week. An old man who couldn’t do anything about it except make sure the suit would fit at the end. Teo didn’t charge him for the second round. Rafa, on Saturday, said that was the right thing to do and also that the jacket was going to look like hell if they kept cutting the side seams, and showed him how to take it in through the back instead.
On the third Tuesday the card said Chest 34. Waist 27. On the fourth, Chest 30.
Teo stopped thinking about hospital beds. Nobody sick was a thirty chest and a twenty-four-and-a-half-inch sleeve. Those were the arms of a grown man on the body of a twelve-year-old. He told himself people lost weight from the torso first. He did not actually know whether that was true.
He asked, carefully, on the fifth Tuesday, whether Mr. Halloran’s friend was in a care home nearby, and whether Teo could go out and measure him there. No charge.
Mr. Halloran looked at him for a while.
“He doesn’t stay anywhere,” he said. “He comes up the back stairs at my house at night and stands in the door of the spare room. He has done that since my wife passed. He doesn’t have anything to wear but what he had on when he came, and it’s not decent. I would like him to have something decent.” He nudged the card across the counter. “I measure him while he stands there. He holds still for it. He’s very patient.”
Teo did not say anything. Rafa, by the window, did not say anything either. Mr. Halloran thanked them both and left.
“He’s lonely,” Rafa said after a minute. “Or he’s going. My father measured people who weren’t there, at the end. Sew it to the card. It’s his money.”
Teo sewed it to the card.
That was the thing about the trade that nobody outside it understood. You didn’t argue with the numbers. A customer said a twenty-nine-inch inseam, you gave them a twenty-nine-inch inseam, and if they came back saying it was wrong, you got out the tape and showed them. The numbers were the contract. So when the sixth card came, he took the trousers in again, and he took the jacket in through the back seam, and when the seventh card said Sleeve 27, longer than the week before, he let the sleeves down as far as the turnbacks allowed and pieced in an inch and a half of matching navy from a remnant bin.
The eighth card said Chest 22. Waist 14. Sleeve 31. Inseam 36. Neck 9.
Teo held it for a long time under the fluorescent lights. He had taken in children’s communion suits that were bigger than that around the chest. A fourteen-inch waist was a wrist and a half. And the inseam had gone up. The trousers would have to be lengthened with fabric that wasn’t there.
There was something else, at the bottom of the card, under the numbers, in the same square hand. Shoulder slope: left 4 in. below right. Please allow for this.
He did it. It took him three nights after closing, with the radio on, and when he hung the finished jacket on the form it looked like something out of a nightmare a child would draw: a long, narrow sack of a coat with one shoulder dropped like a broken coat hanger, sleeves down past where the knees would be. He could not make the form wear it properly. He hung it on a wire hanger instead, under plastic, on the end of the finished rack, and he did not like turning off the lights with it there.
Mr. Halloran did not come on the ninth Tuesday.
Teo looked him up. It took ten minutes. An obituary in the paper: Dennis Halloran, eighty-four, retired from the Port of Stockton, preceded in death by his wife of fifty-one years, Marian. Found at home. No services.
The obituary had run on the Friday before. That was all. Teo told himself it was finished, that he would hang the suit for ninety days the way the sign over the counter said and then donate it, and that would be the end of it.
On Wednesday there was an envelope in the mail slot, hand-delivered, no stamp. Inside was an index card. Blue ballpoint, but not the square hand. This writing leaned backward, and the letters were too tall.
It said: Thank you. It fits now.
Under that was a second set of measurements. Teo read them twice before he understood why they were familiar. Chest 41. Waist 33. Sleeve 33½. Inseam 31. Neck 16. A quarter-inch drop at the right shoulder from carrying bolts of fabric on that side for fifteen years.
They were his. He’d never written them down anywhere. He’d never needed to.
At the bottom, where Mr. Halloran used to sign for him, the card said: for you. I will measure while you sleep. You will hold still for it.
Teo has not gone back to the apartment above the dry cleaner’s since then. He sleeps on the cot in the back of the shop, with the fitting booth curtain open and all the lights on, which Rafa says is costing them a fortune.
The navy suit is still on the end of the finished rack under its plastic. He has tried to throw it out. He put it in the dumpster behind the strip center on Thursday night. On Friday morning it was back on the rack, on its wire hanger, and there was a new card pinned to the shoulder, where a ticket goes.
It said Final fitting and gave a date. It is a Tuesday.
Every morning, before he opens, Teo measures himself with his own tape in front of the three-way mirror in the booth, and writes the numbers down. So far they haven’t changed.
But on the rack, under the plastic, the suit has. It hangs straighter now. The dropped shoulder has come up almost level, on the left side only, as if something has been working at it at night. The sleeves are shorter. The chest has filled out. And when Teo stands next to it in the mirror, he can see that in a week, or maybe less, the suit is going to fit someone exactly his size.
He has been trying to decide whether that someone will be him.