by Obongodu Paul Unanam
Uduak bit the thread between her teeth and pulled it taut before she trusted herself to look at the clock again. Eleven forty. The garment on the table in front of her was a plain white agbada, the kind a man wore into the ground rather than into a wedding, and she had perhaps three hours of work left in it if her hands stayed steady and nobody knocked on the shop door again tonight.
The shop itself was small, one room facing the street and a narrower back room behind a curtain where the unused bolts of cloth were kept, the whole space smelling permanently of machine oil and the particular dust that settled into any building where cutting fabric had happened daily for longer than the building had been repainted. Her grandmother’s sewing machine, the old foot pedal kind rather than electric, still sat in its usual place by the window, though Uduak did most of her own work on the newer machine beside it now, keeping the old one more out of a reluctance to move it than any practical need.
A calendar from a fabric wholesaler hung on the wall above the cutting table, still turned to the month of her grandmother’s death, since Uduak had not yet found the will to flip it forward, and beside it a small framed photograph showed the two of them together at a trade fair some years earlier, both women squinting into a sun neither had thought to shield their eyes against, her grandmother’s hand resting on Uduak’s shoulder in the specific proprietary way of a woman introducing an apprentice to people whose opinion mattered to her.
The day had started ordinarily enough, before any of this. A woman named Mrs. Effiom had come in at nine wanting a dress taken in at the waist, the kind of routine job Uduak could do with her eyes half closed, and had stood in the fitting corner turning slowly while Uduak pinned the extra fabric, chattering the entire time about a wedding she was attending that weekend, entirely unaware that the shop she stood in also, on certain nights, did work of an entirely different kind.
“Your grandmother used to do this exact alteration for me every year,” Mrs. Effiom had said, not unkindly, the comment of a woman simply making conversation rather than testing her. “I put on the same three pounds every Christmas and take it off again by Easter, and she never once made me feel foolish for it.”
“I am not going to make you feel foolish either,” Uduak had said, pins between her lips, and Mrs. Effiom had laughed, and the whole exchange had taken perhaps twenty minutes and left Uduak with the small, ordinary satisfaction of a job done competently, the kind of satisfaction that made the rest of the day’s uncertainty easier to carry.
Her mother had called not long after Mrs. Effiom left, the way she called most days now, ostensibly to check on Uduak’s health and always, somewhere in the first two minutes, arriving at the same suggestion she had been making since the funeral.
“Bassey’s wife knows a man who would take the lease off your hands within the month,” her mother had said, in the tone of a woman offering a genuine kindness rather than a pressure campaign, though Uduak had stopped, weeks ago, being able to hear it as only the former. “You are twenty six, Uduak. You did not train for this the way your grandmother trained for it. Nobody would think less of you for choosing something with regular hours and no dead men’s cloth to worry over.”
“I like the shop, Mama.”
“You like the idea of the shop. Whether you like the actual work of it, alone, at midnight, with no one else in the building, is a different question, and I do not think you have been running it long enough to answer honestly yet.”
Uduak had not told her mother about the notebook, or about the particular category of dead men’s cloth her mother had referenced without knowing how literally the phrase applied, and she did not tell her now, standing in the shop with the unfinished agbada waiting on the table, only said what she always said, the same patient deflection worn smooth from weeks of repetition.
“I am managing, Mama. I will call you Sunday.”
Her mother had not pushed further, that day, though Uduak understood the conversation would repeat itself with only minor variation the following week, and the week after, for as long as it took either her mother’s patience or Uduak’s own resolve to give out first. She was not entirely certain, hanging up the phone, which of the two she expected to last longer.
It was the kind of morning she had, in the five weeks since the funeral, come to rely on more than she liked to admit, proof on the ordinary days that she could run this shop at all, that her hands had learned enough from her grandmother to be trusted with the parts of the trade that did not require a notebook full of warnings. The going cloths were a different matter entirely, and she had not yet had reason, before tonight, to test whether competence at one half of the trade meant anything at all for the other.
Ekaette had arrived not long after Mrs. Effiom left, in the early afternoon rather than evening, though Uduak found herself thinking of the visit later as though it had happened at dusk, the way memory sometimes reshapes the hour of a thing to match how heavy it later came to feel. Ekaette had offered her a way out of exactly this hour, that same afternoon, standing in the doorway with a sample folded over one arm the way a salesman carries a thing he already expects to sell.
“Machine finished,” Ekaette had said, laying the sample flat on the cutting table beside the half started agbada. “Same white, same weight of cloth. My cousin’s factory in Aba does forty of these a week. You would not tell the difference in the shop light.”
Uduak had run her fingers along the sample’s hem the way her grandmother had taught her to check any seam, out of habit more than genuine consideration, and found it competent, even, machine regular in a way hand work never quite managed.
“It is cut and rejoined at every panel,” Uduak said. “Four separate threads, maybe five.”
“Nobody who buries their father is checking how many threads are in the hem, Uduak. They are checking whether it fits by Thursday.” Ekaette had known her grandmother too, had trained under her for a season years earlier before deciding the trade did not suit her patience, and there was something almost kind in the way she said the next part, the way an older sister delivers a hard fact she believes will genuinely help. “You are five weeks into running this shop alone, with rent due and a stack of orders you cannot possibly finish by hand on your own. I am not telling you to abandon the trade. I am telling you nobody would know, and you would sleep tonight instead of sitting up until three doing a hem the old way for a customer who will never once ask how it was made.”
It was, Uduak had to admit even now, sitting under the single bulb with her own eyes burning from tiredness, a genuinely reasonable offer. The money from three unfinished orders sat between her and the landlord’s patience running out entirely. Nobody would know. Her grandmother’s rule sat written in a school exercise book that no living person but Uduak had ever read, and dead women, whatever else might be true about them, could not check her work.
She had said no anyway, that afternoon, more out of a stubborn loyalty to the notebook than any real conviction, and now, deep into the night with her fingers cramping and the deadline pressing closer, she was beginning to regret the stubbornness on purely practical grounds, with no supernatural complication yet in sight to justify it.
Somebody knocked on the shop door again tonight.
She did not get up right away. The shop had two locks and a bolt her grandmother had insisted on years before Uduak understood why a tailoring shop needed to be sealed like a bank after dark, and she counted to five before she crossed the room, the way she had been taught, though she had never once been told what the counting was actually for.
“Who is it?”
“Okon. I came before, this afternoon.”
She unbolted the door for him. Mr. Okon was a heavyset man in his fifties with a handkerchief he kept pressing to his forehead though the night had cooled considerably since sunset, and he came in without waiting to be invited past the threshold, the way people did when they had already decided the transaction gave them the right to.
“I told you Thursday morning,” he said. “The burial is Thursday morning. I am not asking you to hurry for my own comfort. My father is lying in the mortuary right now with nothing proper to be buried in, and I have already told my uncles it is being handled.”
“I told you this afternoon, Thursday morning is possible. I did not say it was easy.”
“I did not come to hear whether it is easy. I came to see the cloth.”
She showed him the agbada, spread flat under the single working bulb that hung over the cutting table, and watched him run two fingers along the collar the way men of his generation always did, checking a seam the way they might check a debt, as though the fabric itself might be trying to cheat him.
“My mother said your grandmother made her mother’s cloth. Forty years ago, maybe more.”
“My grandmother made a great many people’s cloth.”
“She said it was the only shop in this town that did it properly.” He looked up at her then, and something in his face shifted from impatience into something closer to a genuine question, though he did not phrase it as one. “You learned everything from her.”
“I learned what she had time to teach me.”
He did not ask what that meant, and she did not offer to explain it, because there was no way to explain, to a man standing in her shop at midnight worried only about Thursday, that her grandmother had died herself only five weeks earlier, quickly, between one market day and the next, with an entire second half of the trade still folded up inside her that she had never gotten around to passing on. Uduak had inherited a shop, a reputation, and a stack of instructions written in a hand she was still learning to read correctly, instructions that assumed a kind of confidence she did not yet have any right to.
“He was difficult,” Mr. Okon said suddenly, looking down at the half finished garment rather than at her, the way a man speaks more easily to fabric than to a person’s face. “My father. I want you to know that before Thursday, in case it changes how carefully you do this. He was not an easy man to bury well, in the sense that means something beyond the cloth. I would like the cloth, at least, to be the one thing about this week that goes correctly.”
Uduak looked at him a moment longer than the sentence required, hearing something underneath it she was not yet equipped to name, and answered the only part of it she felt qualified to promise. “The cloth will be correct.”
“Thursday morning,” Uduak said again. “You can collect it Wednesday evening.”
He left without further comment, which she had learned in five weeks was the closest thing to trust a grieving man in this town was willing to offer a woman half his age.
She bolted the door behind him, stood a moment with her palm flat against the wood the way her grandmother used to after locking up, though she had never once asked why that particular habit existed either, and went back to the table.
#
Her grandmother’s notebook sat on the shelf above the machine, a school exercise book gone soft at the corners, and Uduak had read it enough times now that certain pages fell open on their own. Not every burial cloth in the notebook had rules attached to it. Most entries were ordinary, a name, a date, a measurement, the kind of record any tailor kept. But scattered through the book, in the same steady hand, were other entries, shorter, stranger, written the way a person writes something they expect only one specific reader to ever need.
Going cloth. One thread only, start to finish. Do not cut it for any reason. If it breaks, you will know before you finish the hem, because the room changes. Finish it properly before morning or he will wait for you to finish it himself.
Uduak had read that page perhaps a dozen times since the funeral and had still not fully decided whether to believe it in the way her grandmother clearly had, or merely to follow it the way she followed every other instruction in the book, out of respect for a woman who had never once, in seventy one years of sewing, been proven wrong about anything that mattered to the trade.
She had asked her grandmother about the going cloths only once, years earlier, twelve years old and more curious than cautious, sitting on the low stool by the machine while the old woman worked a hem by lamplight with a concentration Uduak had never seen her bring to an ordinary shirt.
“Why do you sing for this one and not the wedding dresses.”
Her grandmother had not looked up from the needle. “Because a wedding dress only has to survive one day well. This one has to survive the rest of whatever comes after, and I am not the one who decides how long that is.”
“What happens if you get it wrong.”
“I have never gotten it wrong.” She had said this without pride, the way a person states a simple fact about their own eyesight or hearing, still accurate at an age when such things were beginning to fail most people around her. “Getting it wrong is not the kind of mistake a person survives making twice, Uduak, so I have been careful to make it correctly the only time it has ever mattered.”
She had not explained further, and Uduak, twelve years old and more interested that particular evening in whether she would be allowed to walk to the market alone the next morning, had not pushed for more. It was only in the five weeks since the funeral, going through the shop’s back room alone for the first time, that she had found the notebook tucked inside a biscuit tin behind the bolts of unused cloth, and understood that her grandmother had, at some point, decided the explanation could wait for a written page rather than a spoken one, perhaps because she had not expected to run out of time to say the rest of it in person.
The funeral itself had been a strange, doubled kind of grief, Uduak thought, threading the needle again and beginning where she had left off on the hem. She had grieved her grandmother the ordinary way, the empty chair at meals, the shop’s silence in the mornings when the radio she used to play while cutting fabric no longer came on by itself. But she had also grieved, more privately, a second thing, the specific knowledge that whatever the rest of the notebook contained, whatever her grandmother had still meant to teach her about a trade that apparently extended well past hems and measurements, that teaching had stopped arriving the moment the old woman’s heart had stopped, mid sentence, on an ordinary Tuesday between one customer and the next.
She threaded the needle again and began where she had left off, the long unbroken run of the hem, and told herself the notebook page was simply an old woman’s way of teaching discipline to a granddaughter who might otherwise rush, even as some other, quieter part of her suspected discipline had very little to do with why the instruction had been written at all.
#
The thread broke at one in the morning, cleanly, without warning, the way thread sometimes simply does after enough hours of tension.
Uduak sat very still with the two loose ends in her fingers and listened to the shop.
Nothing had changed that she could name specifically. The bulb still hummed the same way it had hummed all night. The street outside was as quiet as it had been an hour earlier. But something in the air had gone thick in a manner she associated, without being able to explain why, with the moment just before rain, a pressure felt against the skin rather than seen.
She looked toward the fitting corner, where a wooden chair sat beside the curtain customers used to change behind, a chair that had been empty when Mr. Okon left, a chair that was, she was now fairly certain, no longer empty.
Her first instinct was to run for the door, and her hand had actually closed around the edge of the cutting table to push herself up before a second, colder instinct stopped her entirely, the specific realization that whatever was sitting in that chair had almost certainly been sitting closer to her, at some point in the last minute, than it was sitting now, and that the distance between them had increased, not because she had moved, but because it had chosen to give her room to decide what to do next. That courtesy, more than anything else, was what convinced her to stay rather than flee. A thing that wanted to frighten her into running would not have bothered granting her the space to think.
She did not scream. Her grandmother’s notebook, on this particular point, had been specific in a way that felt less like a warning and more like an instruction on manners. He will not hurt you. He only wants what was promised finished. Speak to him the way you would speak to any customer who has been kept waiting too long, because that is exactly what he is. But the notebook had a second line beneath that one, added, Uduak now noticed for the first time, in ink slightly darker, as though written on a separate occasion. He will wait as long as he must. He will not wait patiently forever. If the sun rises twice on an unfinished thread, he stops waiting in the chair.
She had not asked, and the notebook did not say, what waiting stopped looking like once it stopped looking like a chair.
“Good evening,” Uduak said, to the chair, in the flattest voice she could manage.
The man sitting in it was old, older than the photograph Mr. Okon had shown her that afternoon for reference, wearing nothing yet, simply present the way a held breath is present, visible mainly at the edges, clearer if she did not look directly at him and let her eyes rest slightly to one side.
He did not answer her greeting. He looked, instead, at the agbada on the table, at the two loose ends of thread still caught between her fingers, with the specific patient disappointment of an old man watching a young person do a familiar job slightly wrong.
She noticed, in the long silence that followed, small details she would not have expected herself capable of noticing calmly, given the circumstances. His hands rested on his knees exactly the way Mr. Okon’s had rested on the counter two hours earlier, the same particular stillness passed down a generation without either man likely ever remarking on the resemblance while both were living. His feet, bare, did not quite reach the floor, the chair having been built, she realized for the first time in five weeks of owning it, for a taller sitter than either of them. The overhead bulb’s hum, which had been a constant, unremarkable presence all night, seemed to Uduak to thin out slightly in his immediate vicinity, as though the sound itself found the space around him less hospitable to travel through than the rest of the room. Even the air near the chair carried a faint coolness that had nothing to do with the shop’s single ceiling fan, which had not been running, a coolness she noticed the way a person notices the specific chill near an open refrigerator door before consciously registering why.
“I know,” Uduak said. “I broke it. I am going to fix it.”
He did not move from the chair. This, too, matched the notebook. He does not leave until it is correct. He is not angry. He is simply not finished, and a man who is not finished does not know where else to be.
#
She unpicked the hem back to the point where the thread had broken, her hands steadier now than she would have expected, because fear that has a clear procedure attached to it is easier to work through than fear left open ended. The notebook had given her exactly one rule and exactly one consequence. She had, as far as she could tell, exactly one job left to do correctly.
She thought, unpicking the stitches one by one, of Ekaette’s sample folded on the table earlier that afternoon, the machine finished hem cut and rejoined at every panel, four threads, maybe five, competent, even, and entirely against the single line written in a dead woman’s hand on a page nobody living but Uduak had read. She wondered, with the specific bitterness of a person doing something difficult by choice while an easier version of the same task sat unused nearby, whether the old man in the chair would have known the difference if she had simply used Ekaette’s cloth instead and told nobody. Whether the rule was a rule at all, or only a story her grandmother had believed hard enough to make it true for herself, in a shop where nobody had ever tested it against the alternative.
“Your son came tonight,” she said, to fill the silence, not entirely sure whether speaking to him made the work easier or simply made her feel less alone in doing it. “He is worried about Thursday.”
The old man in the chair said nothing, but something in the quality of the room’s stillness suggested he was listening in the specific way people listen when a subject concerns them without quite mattering to them anymore.
“He said your wife’s mother’s cloth was made here too. Forty years ago.”
At this, for the first time, he moved, not toward her, only a slight incline of the head, an old man’s version of acknowledging a fact he had heard correctly. It was, Uduak thought, the most human gesture he had made since she had noticed him, and it steadied her hands further, the way an ordinary detail sometimes does more to calm a frightening night than anything meant to be reassuring.
“Was there ever a time it was done wrong,” she asked. “Before me. In this shop.”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer at all, the way the very old sometimes let a question sit unanswered not from unwillingness but from the simple effort of deciding whether an answer still served any purpose.
“Once,” he said finally. “Before your grandmother. Her own teacher, I am told, though I did not live to see it myself, only heard the story the way stories travel in a small place, softened at the edges by every mouth it passes through.”
“What happened.”
“The thread was cut and rejoined, for a woman who did not want to pay for the slower work. The man they buried in it did not stay in his grave the customary length of time a man is expected to stay quiet in it.” He said this without theatrics, the same flat administrative tone he had used for everything else, a fact reported rather than a story told for effect. “I do not know the particulars. I know only that your grandmother’s teacher never cut a thread again after that, for the rest of her working life, and that she taught your grandmother the same discipline so thoroughly that your grandmother, in turn, apparently felt it necessary to write it down for you, in case she ran out of time to say it herself.”
“You said he did not stay in his grave the customary length of time. What does that mean, exactly.”
“I do not know exactly, and I would not tell you if I did, since I think a woman sewing alone at two in the morning is better served by a general caution than a specific picture to carry into the rest of her night.” He said this without unkindness, the plain refusal of a man deciding, on her behalf, which particular fear was useful to her and which was not. “What I can tell you is that the correction, once it was finally made, required someone to go to the grave itself rather than simply finish the cloth in a shop, and that whoever went did not speak afterward about what the correcting had actually involved. That is the whole of what survived the story by the time it reached me, softened, as I said, by every mouth between.”
Uduak did not ask further, understanding, in the specific way a person understands a closed door without needing it explained to them, that the old man had told her exactly as much as he judged safe for her to carry, and that pressing for the rest would not produce more truth so much as it would produce a version shaped entirely by her own imagination filling whatever gap remained.
Uduak’s needle stopped moving for a moment. “She did run out of time.”
“I am aware,” he said, and for the first time something in his voice carried a texture close to gentleness, though whether it was directed at her or simply at the shared fact of sudden, mid sentence endings, she could not tell. “It is why I imagine she wrote it down at all, rather than trusting it to be passed the ordinary way, hand to hand, across a long enough life to guarantee the lesson arrived complete.”
She re threaded the needle from the same spool, careful to run the new length from precisely where the old thread had broken rather than starting fresh, because the notebook’s instruction had been specific about that too. One thread only. If it breaks, do not begin again from the start. Continue from where it stopped, as though it never broke at all, because what matters is that the garment is finished as a single unbroken thing by morning, not that no mistake ever happened.
She worked for the better part of an hour without looking up, the hem climbing slowly back toward where she had lost it, and when she finally allowed herself to check the chair again, unsure what she would do if he was still there and unsure what she would do if he was not, she found it occupied in exactly the same position, patient, waiting, apparently content to watch a stranger finish a task on his behalf with no particular urgency of his own, since urgency, she supposed, was no longer a thing that touched him the way it touched the living.
#
Somewhere near two, her hands began to shake, not from fear anymore, which had settled into something closer to ordinary tiredness, but from the simple physical fact of three straight hours of fine, careful work stacked on top of a full day’s ordinary labor before it. She set the needle down and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes, and in that brief dark, with her hands finally still, the shortcut presented itself again, more seductive now than it had been in Ekaette’s doorway that afternoon, dressed this time in the entirely reasonable clothing of simple exhaustion. Nobody would know. She could tie off what remained in a fraction of the time, finish the collar with a second length of thread knotted plainly at the shoulder seam where Mr. Okon’s inspecting fingers were least likely to travel, sleep three hours instead of none, and still deliver a garment that looked, to any ordinary eye, entirely correct.
She opened her eyes and looked at the chair before she had fully decided to.
He had not moved, had given no sign of having noticed her hands shaking or the specific temptation sitting behind her closed eyes, and yet something in his stillness felt, in that particular moment, less like patience and more like a held position, a man remaining exactly where he was precisely because he understood, better than she did, how close she had just come to giving him a reason to stop waiting quietly.
“I am not going to do that,” Uduak said, aloud, mostly to herself, and picked the needle back up.
He said nothing in response, which she chose, in the absence of any instruction from the notebook covering this specific moment, to take as the closest thing to approval he was capable of offering a stranger doing his family’s trade for the first time alone.
While the collar section settled into its rhythm, needing less of her direct attention now that her hands had found the pace again, Uduak reached for the notebook on the shelf without fully standing, flipping past the page she already knew by heart to see whether her grandmother had left any other entries on the subject, anything that might explain more of what she was living through in real time rather than after the fact.
Most of what followed was mundane by comparison. A note about which fabrics held a single thread best under long wear, plain cotton over the silk blends customers sometimes requested for wealthier funerals, since silk, her grandmother had written, frays at exactly the moment you can least afford it to. A note about children’s going cloths, shorter entries altogether, the ink noticeably less steady in places, as though the hand writing them had needed to stop and collect itself partway through. Do the same. He waits the same regardless of how many years he had. It is not the years that matter to the waiting. It is only the thread.
One entry, near the notebook’s final pages, was dated only eight months before her grandmother’s death, recent enough that Uduak read it twice, trying to hear her grandmother’s actual voice inside the words rather than simply the careful hand that had written them. If you are reading this because I am no longer able to explain it to you myself, I am sorry for that, and I am not sorry for the trade. It is a hard thing to carry alone your first few times. It becomes, eventually, the part of the work I was proudest of, prouder than any wedding dress I ever finished, because a wedding dress only has to be beautiful. A going cloth has to be true. There is a difference, and you will feel it the first time you get it right, the way I am trusting you are feeling it tonight, whenever tonight turns out to be.
Uduak closed the notebook and set it back on the shelf, her eyes stinging in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour, and returned her full attention to the collar, the last honest work left before morning.
#
Somewhere near three in the morning, exhaustion finally caught up with the fear enough that Uduak found herself talking simply to stay awake, the way a person talks to themselves on a long drive.
“My grandmother never told me your name would matter. Only that the thread mattered.” She bit off the needle’s excess and threaded a fresh length for the collar seam, the last section left. “Was she right about that. Does the thread matter more than the name.”
The old man’s mouth moved for the first time, not quite a smile, closer to the shape a mouth makes when a private joke has been confirmed rather than told.
“She used to sing while she worked,” he said.
His voice, when it finally came, was ordinary in a way that unsettled her more than silence had, a plain, slightly hoarse voice, the voice of any elderly man in the market asking after a price. Uduak’s hands stopped moving entirely.
“You knew her.”
“Everyone here knew her.” He said it simply, without weight attached, a fact rather than a memory offered for comfort. “She made my brother’s cloth also, many years before yours. She sang the whole time. I did not understand it then. I understand it now. A person sings so their hands do not think too hard about what they are actually sewing.”
Uduak did not sing. She did not trust her voice for it tonight. But she kept her hands moving, the collar seam closing stitch by stitch, and something about his having spoken at all, having offered an actual memory rather than simply waiting in judgment, loosened something tight in her chest that had been tight since the moment she first noticed the chair was occupied.
“She died five weeks ago,” Uduak said. “I do not think I am doing this properly.”
“You are doing it correctly enough that I am still able to tell you so.” He said this the way a customer offers the mildest possible compliment on work he has no serious complaint about. “That is the only measure that has ever mattered in this shop. Not whether the hand is confident. Whether the thread holds.”
“Your son said you were difficult.” Uduak said it carefully, not certain whether the dead took offense the way the living did, or whether offense itself was one of the things they set down along with everything else. “He said he hoped this, at least, would go correctly, since the rest of the week has not.”
The old man was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again his voice had lost some of its earlier flatness, replaced by something closer to the specific tiredness of a man reviewing a long ledger he no longer has any power to correct.
“I was difficult,” he said. “I will not pretend otherwise to a stranger sewing my cloth at three in the morning. There were years I could have been a better father and chose, for reasons that felt important at the time and now feel very small, not to be. He is right to hope the cloth is the one thing this week that goes correctly. I would not blame him for hoping I had gone correctly too, and finding, on the balance of it, that I had not.”
“Is that why you are still here.” Uduak asked it before she could decide whether it was a question a person was permitted to ask him. “Not the thread. Something else.”
“No.” He said it plainly, without offense at the question. “The thread is the only reason I am sitting in this particular chair tonight. What I did or did not manage to be for my son is a separate ledger entirely, and not one your grandmother’s rule was ever built to settle. I am aware some of the living hope these two things might resolve together in a single night, a broken hem standing in for every other thing left broken. It would be tidier if that were true. It is not. I will finish being unfinished in this chair, specifically, once the thread holds. Whatever remains unfinished between myself and my son remains his to carry after I am gone from it entirely, the way it would have if I had died with every stitch already perfect.”
Uduak absorbed this in silence, her needle continuing its steady progress along the collar, and found she was grateful, in a way she had not expected to be grateful for anything a dead man told her, for the plainness of it, the refusal to let one kind of unfinished business borrow weight from another simply because they happened to share a room for one night.
A car passed outside on the road, headlights sweeping briefly across the shop’s front window, and somewhere further off a dog began barking at nothing in particular the way dogs did in the deep hours before real morning, ordinary sounds that felt, after so many hours inside the shop’s changed air, almost startling in their unremarkable nature, proof that an entire ordinary town continued sleeping and waking around this one room without any awareness of what it currently held.
#
Dawn came the way it always did in that part of town, gradually and then suddenly, gray light finding its way through the shop’s single window well before the street outside showed any other sign of morning. Uduak tied the final knot on the collar seam as the light reached the cutting table, and held the finished agbada up under the bulb to check it the way her grandmother had taught her to check every piece before it left the shop, turning it slowly, looking for any place the eye could catch on something unfinished.
She found none. The thread ran unbroken from hem to collar, exactly as instructed, exactly as though the break at one in the morning had never happened at all, which was, she understood now, precisely the point.
She looked toward the fitting chair to tell him, out of some instinct she could not fully name, that it was done, that he did not need to wait any longer.
The chair was empty. It had been empty, she realized, for some time, though she could not have said exactly when the room had changed back into an ordinary room, only that at some point in the last hour the pressure in the air had lifted the way pressure lifts once rain has actually fallen rather than merely threatened to.
Uduak sat down heavily on the low stool beside the machine, her legs suddenly aware of the entire night they had spent standing, and allowed herself, for the first time since the thread had broken, to shake properly, the way a person shakes only once the actual danger has passed rather than during it, adrenaline finally released with nowhere urgent left to go. She did not cry, though she came close, closer than she had come at her grandmother’s funeral itself, where the shock of the thing had somehow kept the tears further away than the exhaustion of this single night now brought them.
She slept for two hours on a bolt of unused cloth in the back room, and woke to ordinary daylight and the ordinary sound of the street outside beginning its ordinary Tuesday, and if any part of her wondered, in the grogginess of waking, whether the entire night had simply been three straight days of grief and exhaustion finally catching up with her sanity, that doubt lasted exactly as long as it took her to walk back into the front room and see the finished agbada still lying across the chair back exactly where she had left it, thread unbroken from hem to collar, a fact no amount of tiredness could have hallucinated into existence on its own.
#
Mr. Okon came Wednesday evening as arranged, punctual in the particular way of a man who had spent the intervening two days with very little else to occupy his hands, and Uduak had the agbada wrapped in plain paper and ready on the counter before he had fully crossed the threshold.
He unwrapped it there in the shop rather than waiting until he reached home, laying it flat across the counter the way he had examined the unfinished version two nights earlier, running his fingers along the same collar, the same hem, with the same unhurried thoroughness of a man checking a debt.
“It is good,” he said finally, and something in his shoulders eased that Uduak had not fully registered as tension until she watched it leave him. “It is very good. My mother will be glad to see the family still uses this shop.”
“I told you it would be correct.”
“You did.” He folded the paper back around the garment with more care than the plain brown paper strictly required, the way a person handles anything that has become, however briefly, more important than its ordinary function. “May I ask you something that is not really about the cloth.”
“You may ask.”
“Did you know him. My father. Before this.”
Uduak considered how to answer this honestly without answering it entirely, the way she had been learning, across one very long night, that the trade sometimes required. “I knew of him. Enough to make the cloth correctly.”
Mr. Okon studied her for a moment with an expression she could not fully place, somewhere between suspicion and something closer to hope, the specific look of a man who has heard an answer that does not explain everything and has decided, for reasons of his own, not to ask it to.
He glanced once toward the fitting corner while he said this, an idle, unremarkable glance, the kind any customer’s eyes might make while searching for somewhere to rest between sentences, and Uduak found herself watching him watch the empty chair, wondering, without any way of ever confirming it, whether some small unexamined part of him had felt something there too, briefly, without having the vocabulary or the willingness to call it anything at all.
“He was difficult,” he said again, the same word he had used two nights earlier, standing in the doorway at midnight. “I told you that already. I do not know why I keep saying it to you specifically. Perhaps because you did not know him well enough to argue the point, and everyone else I could say it to would.”
“Sometimes it is easier to tell the truth to someone who has no reason to defend the person you are telling it about.”
He looked at her a moment longer, and something in his face suggested this had landed closer to a real comfort than anything else offered to him across what had clearly been a difficult week, though he did not say so directly, only nodded once, paid the full amount they had agreed without attempting to negotiate the rush fee she had half expected him to contest, and left with the wrapped garment held carefully against his chest the way a man carries something he has decided, somewhere in the last few minutes, matters considerably more than he had expected it to when he walked in.
Uduak bolted the door behind him, the way she now bolted it after every customer, a habit she suspected would stay with her for the rest of her working life whether or not it was ever strictly necessary again.
#
Thursday morning, she did not go to the burial, since she had not been asked and it was not, strictly speaking, the trade’s custom for the tailor to attend, only to send the work out finished and trust the family with the rest of it. She heard the procession pass two streets over around ten, the particular rhythm of a burial convoy moving slowly enough for mourners on foot to keep pace, horns sounding once every so often the way they did for a man whose family wanted the whole town to know he was being seen off properly.
She stood in the shop doorway and listened until the sound faded fully into the ordinary traffic noise of a Thursday late morning, and found herself, without deciding to, saying his name once under her breath, not the notebook’s careful instruction this time, only the plain courtesy of a person marking that something had ended the way it was supposed to.
Whether he had heard it or was, by then, entirely past the reach of anything said aloud in a tailoring shop two streets from his own funeral, she had no way of knowing, and the notebook, on this particular point, offered no further guidance at all.
She went back inside and stood a moment beside the empty fitting chair, running her palm once along its wooden arm the way a person touches a doorframe on the way out of a house they do not expect to enter again in quite the same way, and found the wood ordinary under her hand, warm only from the afternoon sun through the front window, holding nothing that a stranger walking in off the street would have any reason to notice at all.
Her mother called again that evening, the same call she had been making most days for five weeks, and Uduak, still tired in a way sleep had not fully corrected even two days later, found herself, for the first time since the funeral, answering the familiar question with something other than the practiced deflection she had been offering all along.
“Bassey’s wife’s man is still interested, if you have changed your mind.”
“I have not changed my mind, Mama.”
“You never do, on the phone. I keep asking anyway.”
“I know you do.” Uduak sat down on the low stool beside the machine, the phone against her shoulder, looking at the empty chair across the room in the ordinary evening light. “Can I tell you something, and you will not immediately try to talk me out of the shop because of it.”
Her mother was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of a woman deciding whether a promise like that was one she could honestly keep. “Tell me.”
“I understand it now. What she was doing here, all those years. I did not understand it before, not really, even though I watched her do it my whole childhood. I understand it now.”
“Understand what, exactly.”
Uduak looked at the chair a moment longer before answering, choosing, in the end, not to explain the specific shape of the last few days, only the truth sitting underneath them, the only part her mother needed and the only part Uduak felt equal to putting into words that would survive being spoken aloud over a telephone line.
“That it is not really about the cloth,” she said. “It only looks like it is about the cloth.”
Her mother did not ask her to elaborate, which Uduak took, the way she had learned to take the old man’s silences over the preceding nights, as its own kind of answer, and the two of them talked a while longer about ordinary things, a cousin’s wedding, the price of rice at the market that week, before saying goodnight in the plain, unremarkable way families do when the harder conversation has already, somehow, quietly finished itself without either party needing to say so directly.
#
Then she reached for the next garment on the pile, an ordinary shirt someone wanted taken in at the shoulders by Friday, threaded a fresh length onto the needle, and began.
© Obongodu Paul Unanam 2026
I’m a Nigerian legal researcher and writer based in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. My fiction has placed first in the BAC Afrocentric Story Contest and third in the Dear Aliens International Writing Contest, with poetry appearing in the 20.35 Africa Poetry Anthology Series. My legal and policy writing has appeared in TheCable, Africa Is a Country. I hold an LL.B from the University of Uyo.
