The Customer Was Not a Photograph

I was open about not dating exclusively, and that honesty did not magically make every arrangement suitable forever. Ruth wanted to know where our evenings were going. Leya wanted a life in which she was more than the quiet place I visited after a difficult day. Mimi asked whether I could make a decision outside the workshop before a new season required another set of reasons to wait. I liked all three, felt the pressure and briefly considered whether becoming busier would count as an answer. The man who had wasted ten years apparently retained a dangerous talent for wasting a perfectly usable Tuesday.

The business supplied a less avoidable question. I remembered a later style becoming popular and pushed a new cut into production before we had tested it on enough actual customers. It looked wonderful in a photograph and fitted badly on too many people who wanted to wear it. Mimi had warned me. I called her concerns conservative, then watched a customer try to sit comfortably while I explained how modern the shape was. She looked at the mirror, looked at me and said modern people still needed to sit down. The room became very quiet. It was an excellent review, though I disliked receiving it in person.

We stopped the release, paid the workers and remade or refunded the affected orders. The loss, including rework, was thirty-five thousand kwacha from retained company funds. It hurt. I apologized without adding a paragraph about how well the idea might have worked in a different future. Mimi took out the current measurements and asked which of them I intended to listen to this time. We made a revised version with real fittings, brought customers back by appointment and discovered that pleasure in an original design did not require the body inside it to become obedient to a picture.

My old employer was Boni. He told a private buyer that we were good at looking fashionable and poor at making ordinary people comfortable. The buyer asked to see the work rather than the argument. We showed finished garments, current fittings and clear delivery capacity. Mimi let a customer move, sit and reach without making a performance of it. Boni had quoted a cheaper line but could not support the promised sizes and alteration schedule. We won a paid trial order for the portion we could actually make. Then the repeat order came. I enjoyed it more because the invoice contained a useful number instead of a promise that somebody had admired our potential.

Boni later offered to put our work in his shop under his name. I offered an ordinary branded wholesale arrangement if the terms suited both businesses. He said he had taught me the trade. I said I remembered, and that the first lesson I had finally learned was to charge for what I could do. Mimi kept her expression straight until he left, which I considered a more impressive technical achievement than anything we had sewn that week. We bought the team dinner, paid the agreed bonuses from actual company earnings and went home without pretending the whole city had gathered to watch one man lose an argument.

I asked Mimi to dinner with no sample bags, no future forecast and no useful excuse. She wore blue and watched me spend several seconds trying to begin a sentence I should have said months earlier. I told her I loved her and wanted a shared life that did not end when the workshop lights went off. Mimi asked whether I wanted the woman or simply wanted to keep the one who knew how much trouble my ideas could cause. I said the woman, including the days when her own idea mattered more than helping mine survive. She smiled, took my hand and said that was finally a proposal worth discussing after dessert.

Ruth was hurt and wanted a definite goodbye. I gave her one without asking her to make it reassuring. Leya asked the question I deserved: had I chosen Mimi, or had I discovered she would not wait indefinitely beside a business? I said I had chosen her, and understood why the timing made Leya doubt it. She kissed my cheek, told me she would keep the good evenings and asked me not to return whenever another decision became difficult. I respected the answer. Her bookshop remained hers, and every time I visited later I paid for books rather than treating a familiar smile as an invitation she had not given.

Lola, Nia and Joy had their own work, tours and stories. Tina wanted a man with more room in his ordinary week. Faye said she had enjoyed admiring the jacket and its maker, then moved on without returning the pleasure as a debt I could collect. Bea, Anna, Mary and Lucy each received a personal conversation, not a convenient general announcement. Some wanted friendship, some distance. None needed to leave a quiet corner of the future reserved for me. I learned that being chosen by a woman did not mean the others had failed to understand what I was worth. They had lives worth choosing too.

Mimi and I argued occasionally about who was turning a weekend into a workday. She kept her own room for drawing, and I learned to ask before carrying a new idea into it. In the evenings she would sit close, take my hand and tell me something that had nothing to do with an order. Sometimes she tried on a dress she had made for herself, turned before the mirror and asked if I had any professional opinion. I usually lost the useful version of it halfway through the sentence. Mimi laughed, pulled me close and said certain inspections could wait until morning. The night kept its private details to itself.