Page 106 of Sweet Ruin

“Where now, sir?” Stepan asks through the partition.

“Sunset Park,” Kane says. “Forty-Fourth.”

I look at him. “That’s my neighborhood.”

“No, sladkaya,” he murmurs. “It’s mine.”

21

DELILAH

This shopfront comes from a different world than Maison d’Hiver. It sits on a corner, a walk-up with a dry cleaner on the ground floor and a hand-painted sign in the second-floor window that says ALTERATIONS — BRIDAL — MEN’S.

Kane walks me up the steps, leaving Stepan in the car at the curb. At the top waits a door with a pane of frosted glass and a light on behind it.

The woman who opens when we ring the bell is old. Small, in a loose-fitting cardigan, with glasses on a beaded chain looped around her neck and her gray hair escaping the chopsticks she’s stabbed through the bun. The tape measure draped over her shoulders looks like it lives there day and night.

She stops short and looks up at Kane for an uncomfortably long time, saying nothing.

Then she mumbles something in what I think is Russian, steps back, and waves us in with one wrinkled hand.

The workroom is warm and packed to the brim. Two industrial machines. A pressing table with a scorched cover. Bolts of fabric piled in a corner. Dress forms in a row along the wall with pins stuck in the shoulders. There’s a radio playing accordion music until she reaches over and turns it down.

“Ekaterina, this is Delilah,” Kane says, pointing at me. “Delilah, this is Ekaterina.”

Ekaterina looks at me. Not at my middle, not up and down, not with the haughty condescension of the first saleswoman. At my face.

Then she smiles. “She’s lovely. Come here, dear. Coat off. Shoes stay on.”

I take my coat off and she immediately starts measuring. Bust. Underbust. Waist. Hip. She goes around behind me and does shoulder to waist, then waist to knee, then all the way down. She scribbles each one down on a little pad with a pencil stub.

I haven’t been sized up like this since I was getting fitted for my wedding dress. That seamstress ran a busy shop in Bay Ridge, and she kept saying, “We can let it out more” over and over again.

Kane pulls a wooden chair out from the wall, turns it to face the changing curtain, and sits down. He puts one ankle over the other knee.

“You’re staying?” I say.

“I’m the one who has to look at you all night. Yes, I’m staying.”

Ekaterina just clucks her tongue and goes to a rack in the back, where she starts pushing hangers apart.

“Nothing here is made for you,” she says over her shoulder. “But some of it can be.”

“That’s okay. I’m easy.”

“No such thing.” She pulls something out and holds it up to the light, then shakes her head and puts it back. “Every woman is hard. That’s why I have a job.”

She comes back with a few things tossed over her arm and hangs them on a hook inside the curtain. Then she pushes me inside, tugs the curtain around me, and leaves me alone in this little canvas box with a scuffed, frameless mirror screwed to the wall.

The first one is navy. Long sleeves, high neck, and a straight skirt that goes past my knees. It has a lot of fabric in it and leaves little in the way of skin showing. It’s what I’d pick out for myself, which is how I know it’s safe and boring.

It goes on without too much of a fight. The zipper is a bit of a project at the top, but after a few seconds of struggle, I get it done. I look at myself in the little mirror and think, Okay. Fine. Nobody’s going to point at me.

“Come out, please,” Ekaterina says.

I push the curtain aside and step out onto the strip of clear floor between the pressing table and the dress forms. Kane is where he was, ankle over knee, hands loose. He looks at me without saying anything, longer than he needs to.

“Turn,” he says.