My Father's Shop Had No Sign

My father's shop has no sign because everyone in the lane already knows what is inside it. Two windows, a door that sticks in the rainy season, and a smell of lanolin and damp wool I have never found anywhere else. I learned to sort skeins by touch there, before I could read the numbers on the labels.

He did not teach me with instructions. He put a damaged rug in front of me and said nothing, and when I had done it wrong he turned it over and showed me the back, where the mistake was visible. That was the lesson. It took me a year to understand he was teaching me how to look, not how to knot.

The Drawer of Leftover Thread

There is a drawer at the back with a hundred small skeins, some older than me, kept because a color might be needed again. Nothing in it is labeled. When he stops opening the shop in the morning, that drawer will be the hardest thing here to inherit, and I will have to learn it the old way — by being wrong in front of it.

He never said the drawer mattered. He only kept it locked.

Now I work in the back room and he sits by the window with tea and a radio he does not listen to. We argue about mordants. He thinks I use too much alum. He is probably right, but the brown I get is closer to the old brown, and he knows it, which is why he keeps arguing.

What the Shop Will Be

He wants me to take the front room when he is finished, put up a sign, and sell to people who arrive with money and no story. I have not said no. I have also not moved my table. There is a way of refusing that looks like being slow, and I learned that in his shop too.

A sign tells people what you sell. No sign tells them who to ask.

In the evening I sweep the front room and lock the drawer, and we walk home separately because he walks too fast. The lane smells of bread at that hour. I am thirty-four, and I still turn my work over and check the back before I show it to him.