The Man with Two Good Shirts

I declined a long expensive lease in June. Ajak argued that we needed space, then listened when I proposed a smaller arrangement and regional suppliers who did not require all our money to remain in one place. We checked the actual options rather than treating my anxiety as authority. My mother traveled to relatives before July under ordinary lawful arrangements. Other people made their own choices. When fighting came, early preparation could not make what happened good. It meant our family was not also trying to decide whether a signed lease mattered more than leaving a dangerous situation.

The business continued where it genuinely could, through regional partners and customers beyond one city, with operations paused or altered when conditions required. We did not run thrilling journeys through violence because I remembered a road on a future map. Qualified carriers and responsible people made the actual decisions. The first profit I cared about was finding my mother irritated by the relatives’ cooking instead of searching for her through silence. She told me she had not traveled all that way to be stared at. I bought her a better chair and let her complain in comfort.

Rose ran a small guesthouse and took me to task for arriving at dinner with two telephones. She was thirty, sharp-eyed and capable of making a quiet room feel like a private occasion. After I put both phones away, she poured tea and asked what I would do if the business actually succeeded. I said I might buy a third good shirt. Rose looked at the one I wore, smiled and suggested I begin sooner. On our next evening she chose a shirt for me, adjusted it at the shoulder and said I had become considerably harder to dismiss at the door.

Lucy sold clothes and had no intention of letting Rose take sole credit for that improvement. At twenty-five she had built her shop by recognizing what people wanted before they could explain it. I paid her for the clothes and asked her to dinner separately. Lucy arrived in yellow, bright enough to make me feel as though the room had been repainted. She asked whether I preferred women who agreed with me. I said I had not met enough to form a useful comparison. She laughed, rested a hand against mine and said my chances of meeting one had not improved that evening.

Rita, thirty-one, owned the restaurant where we increasingly met customers. She knew which table allowed a difficult conversation to end without the whole room attending it. After one successful meeting she brought a small dessert and sat opposite me. It was not on the bill, she said, but the next dinner would be, because she would be a guest. Rita leaned forward, her perfume warm against the scent of coffee, and asked whether I understood the invitation. I said I was trying to enjoy understanding it without making a speech. She approved of the restraint enough to kiss my cheek when I left.

Anna taught adults and helped staff learn the communication skills our work actually required. She was twenty-six, funny and very good at noticing when I used a complicated word to avoid a simple answer. At a friend’s gathering she pulled me into a dance, told me to stop examining everyone’s feet and asked what I was waiting for. I had spent a decade waiting for better timing. I said nothing and danced. Anna smiled as though I had finally completed the easiest exercise in the class, then kept my hand after the music changed.

Ajak was not impressed by the sudden rise in dinner expenses. She was amused by it, which proved worse. During a late stock check she asked whether the new shirts had brought any improvement in my ability to remember a supplier’s reference number. I gave her the number. She looked surprised, then accused me of preparing for the question. I said I had begun taking her seriously. Ajak stepped closer, straightened the collar Lucy had sold me and said she would decide whether that was true after I learned to take her to supper without a spreadsheet.

I did. We argued about almost nothing, laughed at something foolish and discovered how easy the evening became when neither was supervising the other. Outside, she stopped beside me and said she liked the man I was becoming but would not be treated as a secret because customers expected us to be purely professional. I told her I was seeing other people and would not invent exclusivity to make the moment easier. Ajak considered that, then kissed me with a confidence that made the street disappear. She said we would keep talking. For once, I did not need a more convenient answer.