After our first year in southeastern Ohio my husband Ben said that he needed to spend the summer in a city, and that’s how we ended up, that June and July, living in a dark one-bedroom apartment over Pine Street in Philadelphia, the kind of place where a thing like this could happen. We had picked Philadelphia because it would give Ben easy access to Poe’s house and Whitman’s house for research. Plus he said good things about the neighborhood – antiques, little urban parks, beautiful old houses. We had picked the apartment because it was short-term. We pictured a building full of people like us, wandering academics and their families. Instead it was one of those month-to-month places for people who don’t know what’s going to happen to them beyond a paycheck or two.

“Is this safe?” I said to Ben when the landlord left us alone in our apartment. Little Tamar was asleep in my arms, six months old then. I bounced her and looked at the dirty green curtains hanging heavy and lopsided along the windows, the dark-spotted rugs.

“It’s safe,” Ben said. “You have to be pretty rich to live in this neighborhood.”

“Not to live in this building, though,” I said, bouncing. I pictured the narrow, dark hallways we had come through on the way up to this apartment. The weak lightbulbs and the gray walls, dirty as though weary people had been leaning on them for many decades.

Ben shrugged. “It’s not fancy.”

There wasn’t much to do about it, so we stayed there, and when Ben wasn’t out researching we wandered into the city together to entertain ourselves and Tamar. She was still young enough to not care much about zoos or children’s museums, but a ride in the stroller or a stop at a park bench made her happy and gave me and Ben a chance to absorb the movement and life of a city, the aggressive summer sun of the east coast. I liked being outdoors there. The atmosphere I had grown up with in Portland, Oregon, was softer, but any kind of city was a joy for me.

Even when Ben was out working, I tried to be out of the apartment as much as possible. The building was very quiet – maybe that should have reassured me, but it ended up being part of what unnerved me. It left a lot of mystery in the other apartments. And the quiet also meant that thoughts about the fall crept in on me, questions about whether I’d just keep haunting the streets of our new little Ohio town with Tamar in the stroller or whether I would try to get back to work. I had been to a lot of school, but didn’t want to do what I had been taught to do.

“So what do you want to do?” Ben had asked more than once.

“If I knew, I’d do it,” I had said.

Those were the kinds of things I couldn’t help but think about when I was alone inside for Tamar’s naps. The rest of the time I took her out, even just to the little park on the corner across the street, where we’d watch all the cars back up at the traffic light and then get moving again. Or I’d talk to the strange guy who owned the antique store next door to the building. He was a short, middle-aged guy named Frank with marine tattoos and a bad hairpiece, and he liked to talk about how slow business was, and about the war in Iraq. Once while he was sweeping the sidewalk – he swept the sidewalk, I think, to keep from spending time in a shop without customers – he said that if he hadn’t been too old, he’d go and “cut off Osama bin Laden’s fucking head” himself. Then his eyes went to my stroller and he said, “Sorry. You know.”

Otherwise I sat in the park, waiting for Ben to get back.

 

Because of all of this, when the doorbell unexpectedly rang during one of Tamar’s afternoon naps I sort of leapt up to go answer it, without even thinking. If I’d had time to think, probably I would have stayed in the apartment with the door bolted – but I was in a desperate way, and it was like a reflex, responding to that desperation as much as to the doorbell.

There was no intercom, and I locked our place up, Tamar sleeping inside, and went down the flight of stairs to the main door. It was a beautiful door, the glass covered with an ornate leafy grillwork that fit in with the rest of antique row. Behind it were the shapes of two men.

I opened the door, and the two men were police officers in uniform, but with protective vests on. Immediately my mind went to Tamar up in our apartment. I think I lifted my hand in a kind of defensive instinct.

“Can I help you?” I said, right from the script.

The man in front, a kind of leading-man face, smiled. He was wearing a baseball cap with the Superman logo on it. “Sorry to bother you,” he said. “We were looking for someone else, but you were the only person who answered any of the doorbells.”

“Oh.”

The man behind him had no cap on, just some neat dark hair. He seemed to be trying to not catch my attention, standing behind and down a step from Superman, who now brought my eyes back to him by pulling out a piece of paper.

“Have you ever seen this person in this building?”

I looked at the photo. It was the face of a Middle Eastern young man with close-cropped hair. I studied the picture carefully, looked at it all very closely, as I felt I should. The name under the photo seemed Middle Eastern, too.

“I haven’t,” I said. I actually hadn’t ever seen anyone in the building. Still – I felt a chill on my back. “Is this a dangerous person? Is he in this building?”

The officer smiled again. “He probably doesn’t live here anymore. It’s a last known address – from a year ago.”

“I have a baby upstairs. I’m alone with a baby.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and then he pulled a business card from a shirt pocket, under his vest. It offered up Superman’s name – William McAlister – along with the words Homeland Security. My heart seized. I looked again at the second officer, dark and quiet in the background, his look steady, uncommunicative. “If you do see this man,” Officer McAlister said, “just give our office a call. But don’t worry. I’m sure he’s moved on.”

Then they were leaving and I was closing the door and leaning on the grillwork. My heart was going fast. Tamar. I jumped off the door and bolted for the stairs. I was very aware now of the darkness of the hallway, the other people hidden away in the other apartments around me. I took the steps two at a time.

And there he was in front of me. There, standing in the open apartment door across the hall from ours, was a man. The man. His hair longer, wild from sleep, stubbled face, a white t-shirt and sweatpants on, but the very man who had been in the photo. Behind him his apartment was very dark. I saw maybe the edge of a table. He was rubbing an eye socket with the heel of one of his hands.

“Who was that?” he said. “They rang my bell.”

Tamar was past him, through our door and in our apartment. I felt a little like a wild animal in a very dangerous situation, a crucial moment.

I moved toward him. I had to. “It was the police,” I said, talking without thinking about it just because he had asked me a question. “They were looking for you.” His face fell wide open in dumb surprise.

He was going to ask me something else, maybe, or do something, but then I got past him, fumbled until I had the door unlocked, and just turned my head as I went in. “Good luck,” I said. Later on I would wonder at myself, at why I had said any of what I’d said, the mindlessness.

I held the inside of the door closed with my back, feeling the wild pulse of my whole body against the cheap, light wood. Then I turned, looked through the peephole. The man was shambling down the stairs. I ran to check Tamar in the bedroom – still there, and fully asleep. Then I was in our ugly dark living room with my cell phone open.

A woman, a dispatcher, answered.

I whispered: “Officer McAlister was just at my building.” I gave her the address. “He was looking for this man – I don’t remember his name – and I hadn’t seen him, but then I came upstairs and he was there.”

“Is he still in the building?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know. He was going down the stairs. I told him…I told him you were looking for him.”

“I’ll get a hold of Officer McAlister and get him back to your address as soon as possible,” she said. “Can you be there to answer the door?”

“I have a baby in my apartment,” I said. I could feel that wild animal feeling again.

“Can you go outside with her? Wait across the street?”

“Okay,” I said, more because this woman seemed to think it’d be a good idea than because of anything I thought about it.

After I hung up I went to the bedroom and stood over Tamar’s portable crib. I didn’t know if she’d be safer in here or outside. I didn’t even know where the man was. My hands curled around the top rail of the crib. She was a pale baby, chubby but not nearly as chubby as other babies her age. She still had only these wisps of hair.

I left her for a moment to go check out the hallway alone. There was nobody anywhere, not outside my door, not on the stairs, not by the front door.

I ran back and scooped Tamar up – she barely stirred – and then I checked the peephole at the apartment door – still nobody there – before going through it and then fast down the stairs. I ran outside and across the street to the little park, put us behind a big tree there so that we couldn’t easily be seen. I was holding Tamar like we were in a strong blast of wind. I danced from foot to foot and saw Frank come out and sweep the sidewalk. In his shop window I saw the chairs and lamps that he wasn’t selling.

I got on the cell phone to Ben, and as soon as he picked up I just started pouring the story all out. “Wait, wait – what?” he said, and I went through it again.

“Wow,” he said when he got it. “I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t worry – it’s probably just some immigration thing. But stay away.” Right. I could do that.

The police car – a regular car – pulled up to the curb a few minutes later. Officer McAlister and the quieter one got out, spotted me easily and crossed the street to me. The Superman hat was still on. “Do you know if he’s in the building?” he said.

“I don’t know. I guess I told him you were coming.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. “Can you please let us in?”

“Right,” I said. Tamar was in my arms – but I was too shell-shocked to do anything but take directions. Only later did it occur to me that I could have just given him my keys. I crossed the street, somehow in the lead. I hadn’t been in the lead of anything for a year – maybe longer. Maybe since I first saw the blue line that meant pregnancy on the test stick. I held Tamar and shifted her into one arm and unlocked the door.

“Can you show us which apartment door it is?” he said.

Again without thinking, I went in and up the stairs, still in the lead – and just as I was going to point to the door, I saw that the man was already standing there, still messy from sleep. His eyes were all young consternation and uncertainty.

“They came back,” I said lamely. My chest had seized up again.

The two officers pushed past me and used the man’s name, backed him into his apartment. Their hands were on their holstered guns. The sight of that woke me up, made me realize what I was doing, got me moving back down and out to the sidewalk. Frank was still standing there with his broom.

“What was that, anyway?” he said.

“Homeland Security,” I said. I was only halfway seeing him, all the rest of my astonished, horrified attention on the danger I had just taken on, and not just for me but for Tamar, too. A new kind of shock started to set in.

Frank didn’t seem that surprised to hear the words Homeland Security. “Who were they looking for?”

I stammered, told him I hadn’t caught the name, but that it was the Middle Eastern man on the second floor. How could I have taken Tamar back into that place? I took a first step away from the building, ready to run.

But then Frank sighed, leaned his weight a little on his broom. “Yeah – that’s what I thought.”

I looked at him, all my attention on him now.

“No – nothing like that. I mean, I actually know a guy, and I had Adi checked out when he moved in last year.” I looked at him with more surprise. He shrugged. “I’m not having any terrorists living next to my shop. But the point is he checked out.”

I felt the edge of another kind of chill come over me. “So why were you expecting this?”

“He’s on a student visa, and a couple of months ago he just stopped going to class. He’s a nice kid, Adi, but he’s lazy. I told him it was going to catch up with him.”

I had called the police to come arrest a slacker. A slacker who was an Arab. The chill surged through me and I bounced Tamar a little vigorously to shake myself loose of it.

A moment later the front door opened, the leaves of the grillwork sweeping out into the street, and the two officers, Superman again in front, took Adi out to the car. He looked at me for just a flash, a depressed sort of look, resigned. My eyes dropped away from his and I saw that he had these dirty sneakers on, completely untied, flapping loose on his feet. Next to me, Frank shook his head. “I’ll call somebody, Adi,” he said.

I looked at the young man’s face again. He was nodding, already turned away from us, focused on the inside of the police car. The two officers put him in there, holding his head down to keep it from bumping the door frame, and went to their separate doors. Officer McAlister tipped his Superman cap to me quietly – a blast of nerves went through me until I remembered that this was just a delinquent student – and then he got in the car, and they all drove off. Still the other officer hadn’t said anything. I guessed it was a technique of theirs – heroic cop, silent cop.

“A shame,” Frank said. “I’d better make that call.” He picked up his broom and went back inside.

I stood on the street corner a minute. The cars went by. Tamar continued to sleep – she hadn’t woken up this whole time. She didn’t know anything about it. There was nowhere else to go, really, but still I didn’t go back into the apartment. I waited for the street to clear of cars and then I crossed the little street to the park and sat on a bench, waited for Tamar to wake up on her own.

Ben found me before she was done with her nap. He was half-running, with his cell-phone to his ear, and I heard mine ring just as I saw him come into view. I told him I was in the park and he swung his head around a little wildly until he spotted me.

“Are you okay?” he said. “What happened?”

I told him. For a half-hour I had been sitting in my considerable guilt – about Tamar, about the poor student I had turned in – and it was good at least to say it all out loud.

“Wow,” Ben said, sitting. “Well, what else could you have done? I mean, really?”

We sat together on the bench for a long time, and eventually Tamar woke up, and I fed her, and we walked upstairs to the apartment. Adi’s door was partway open, and I could see that it was definitely the edge of a table there, a single dirty plate.

“Do you think we need to move to somewhere else?” I said. “I mean, what if he comes back and he’s angry?”

Ben pulled Adi’s door shut. “They’re not going to let him go,” he said. “They’re going to deport him. You can bet on that.” Ben was always very sure about how things would go. He put his hand on the small of my back and I let him guide me into the apartment.

 

And that was it. The summer just went on from there, with Ben’s work continuing and our family time together and all the walks through Center City Philadelphia. Adi never came back and Frank confirmed that, as far as he could tell, it had all resulted in deportation. The door across the hall stayed shut. When Tamar napped I sat in the apartment and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with the approaching fall. Spend all day every day with the baby in our Ohio house with the nice floors and the mold in the walls and the big yard and the cars racing by on the county road with the blind turns? Cruise the library again looking for other moms? Get a day job somewhere? And doing what? With all this going through my head, I almost hoped the doorbell would ring with some more excitement, but again I felt guilty whenever my mind flashed to Adi, which it often did. I always pictured that slept-on hair, the loose sneakers, his eyes looking into the police car.

Whenever we spent time with one or another of Ben’s friends or relatives from the area, he always asked me to retell the story. He felt that it was a pretty good story, more comic than frightening if Adi was just a lazy student. So I told the story, and I learned how to build the suspense and what side details were the ones that really grabbed people. Everyone was really interested in the Superman hat, for example. That was part of what made it comic, but I always wound up talking about how bad I felt about the whole thing, and I always ended up feeling bad from telling it.

One time, though, we were eating dinner with a couple, both of them lawyers, and the woman said, “You know, there’s no way they would send two guys around for just a little visa problem like that. There are way too many people in violation of their visas.”

I sat up straight in my chair. The table was set beautifully, a dark tablecloth spotted with candles between the pewter dishes of food. Their whole place, a big Center City apartment, was gorgeous. They had been lawyers from the minute they were born, I thought. “What about profiling?” I said. “He was from the United Arab Emirates.”

“Even so,” she said, and her husband nodded. “There are just way too many. He had to have been a person of interest.”

Ben’s eyes were wide, in his taking-it-in, interested look. How about that? his eyes said.

“So maybe…” I said.

“Probably,” the woman said. “Fairly probably.” I remember the way that she held her fork in her hand in that moment – loosely, tines-up, but as though it would have been hard to get it away from her if you lunged for it. She was ready.

After dessert, I went to get Tamar, who we’d put down to temporary sleep in the couple’s bedroom – they didn’t have a baby themselves. I stood over her portable crib, the same way I had on the day the police came. You couldn’t tell that she was pale, or anything about her hair, in the darkness of the room, but I could see her chest going up and down. I had come to be able to see that under virtually any conditions. I often checked her. I stared at the breathing now and wondered what I would do next. Every time I checked, she was always breathing. Every time I stood there, I held the edge of the crib like looking over a wall at something uncertain on the other side.

He was certainly one of the most famous tailors on all of Kyushu. Even women from big cities like Fukuoka and Kagoshima coveted his evening gowns and long skirts and would come driving over the mountains in their fancy cars, descending upon Ebino with eyes that looked neither right nor left as if afraid to take in the details of our shabby farming town. The women would stride into his shop on wobbly high heels only to leave an hour later with large white boxes containing mysteries of silk, taffeta and the occasional sequin. But to us, he was simply Teiraa-san. The Tailor.

The front of his modest shop looked out across main street Ebino, practically unnoticeable between Mr. Noguchi’s fish shop with its mountains of crushed ice and the Fukae’s Soba restaurant. The yawning plate glass window of the tailor’s store was filled with a sturdy hedge of gray and black cloth. Hundreds of suit jackets stacked against each other like flattened soldiers. Squeezing this hedge from the two sides were blank-face mannequins that wore his suits with so much pride. Inside the shop the walls were layered with bolts of somber fabric; grays and navy blues, mossy browns and the occasional pin stripe. There wasn’t even a counter or a cash register. Teiraa-san kept everything in his head.

Teiraa-san’s real name was Nishikokubaru Junichiro. But few people ever called him that. My father, who was ten years older and had once worked for Teiraa-san’s deceased uncle, was someone who did. He called him by his long full last name. And he shouted it. Although my father shouted almost everything and so it wasn’t a great surprise to hear that awful but all too familiar bellow each time I accompanied him to Teiraa-san’sshop.

“NI-SHI-KO-KU-BARU-KUN!” my father would boom, his fingers hooked into the front pockets of his dark suit. Somewhere near the third syllable I would hunch my shoulders and hold my breath, waiting for that final nnnnn to come sliding mercifully out.

Then Teiraa-san would bow and grin and say, “You’ve got a cold or something? Laryngitis? Why so quiet all of a sudden?”

He was an elegant man with limbs like eels. Flowing and in constant motion. The long fingers that stuck out from the sleeves of his yukata (he himself never wore the Western style suits he made with such renown) were knobby yet graceful, and always occupied with a piece of cloth. He was either testing a new stitch while he talked, pulling the darting fish-like needle through a patch of fabric, or measuring. Always measuring. Sometimes he would measure me while he spoke with my father. His nimble hands would wrap the cloth measuring tape around my neck, across my shoulders, down my arm, encircle my waist. All without looking at me. My father never seemed to notice.

Teiraa-san was a single man and as such an object of intense curiosity for me, not to mention for the rest of the town. It was rare in Kobayashi for men to remain single and stay put. If they weren’t married by a certain age everyone knew they were planning to move off to Fukuoka or Miyazaki or once, in a famous case, to Kyoto. But Teiraa-san was different. He was staying and that was clear but no women flitted past his window in their best dresses nor invited him to their families’ hana–matsuri in the spring. Every year in April he made the rounds of the town, stopping to admire the swiftly falling cherry blossoms with all the families in turn.

 

Once I dared ask my mother how old Teiraa-san was. I was helping her make mochi for our own hana-matsuri that night. In my excitement to see my cousins and aunts and uncles I had more courage than usual.

I asked my bold question but kept my face pointed toward the mass of glutinous rice I was sugaring. I heard her stop and wipe her hands across her apron.

She sighed, “Not as old as you think, Ayaka, but he has lived more than most of us.”

What a magnificent riddle this sentence was for me. I knew that Teiraa-san was the oldest son of his father and so many years my senior. I finished sugaring the mochi, wrapped it carefully in plastic and put it in the fridge, my thoughts bustling with reasons why Teiraa-san might be so lucky.

That night when he finally stopped by our party, after my father had shouted his welcome and two of my aunts had accosted him with dress ideas, Teiraa-san stood alone under the largest cherry tree on our property sipping a frosty mug of beermy mother had pressed upon him. I was, to my great embarrassment, just above him in the branches of the tree. It was the last year I was allowing myself the luxury of climbing the tree during the matsuri, for the next year I could no longer behave like such a child.

I had been studying the effect of the wind on blossoms that didn’t seem at all likely to fall but then did with only the slightest breeze when I heard my father’s customary boom and so knew that Teiraa-san was in the garden. I had resolved to climb down immediately so as to study his face and determine his age but then a handful of enormous dragonflies had landed on the very branch I was sitting and I lost myself completely in an examination of their jeweled serpentine bodies.

“Is the branch sturdy enough for me, too?”

I searched the lawn in the dimming light for one of my cousins. Emiko hopefully, because she was loud and brash and could deal with Teiraa-san without trembling, or worse, crying, like I knew I might.

“So you think it’s too weak? That is sad indeed. You might have to cut the tree down in a few years then.”

“It’s not weak,” I answered despite myself. “It’s the strongest tree in the garden.”

“I see the genetics of volume do not run in your family. That is a relief.”

And then I couldn’t help but laugh because I knew he was making fun of my father and no one had ever dared do that in front of me. But I stopped laughing right away because he was climbing, and quickly. Soon he was seated on the branch next to me, holding onto to a higher branch for support.

“You don’t like parties, Ayaka-chan?”

He knew my name and this was enough to send me into a mortified silence.

“I know what you mean. Sometimes it is nice not to have to speak to anyone. Let’s just admire the cherry blossoms, shall we? People talk too much anyway.”

Sitting in the tree was also the first time I had ever seen Teiraa-san without something in his hands. And so those two awe-inspiring appendages were motionless. He had let go of the upper branch and was resting them on his knees. I was unable to stop looking at them. They were not beautiful objects, by any means. In fact, they were scarred and pricked, ragged with hangnails and his fingernails badly needed cutting.

He caught me staring and laughed, “Pathetic aren’t they?”

I shook my head with defiance, swelling with respect for arguably the most famous of Ebino’s citizens.

“No, Ayaka-chan,” he said, holding his hands up to touch a withered blossom. “These are useless.” He plucked the browning flower and it fluttered to the ground. “That one didn’t even have enough sense to fall on its own.”

He changed the subject then, complimenting me on the mochi which my mother had informed him I had made. We discussed the weather and my suspicions that we would see a dragonfly plague before the end of summer. He agreed with me, I realize now with a certain condescension and good humor, that this infestation would be a marvelous thing indeed.

Before long he bade me goodnight and slipped down from the tree to continue his visiting with other families around town.

 

In May the year I turned seventeen I was invited to my first dance by a university student who would later become my husband. I knew exactly who I wanted to ask to make my dress for me but was relieved when my mother broached the subject with my father on her own.

“You will ask Teiraa-san to make Ayaka a dress, won’t you?” My mother always had a knack for understanding the potential of a situation.

“Nishikokubaru-san?”

“Of course. Who else?”

My father grunted his assent and I could let out the breath I was holding. But I was not allowed to choose the pattern for my dress. Only the color.

My mother said, “Do what you want. But I think you should consider a light green. Like the ocean. You will look nice in that.”

I didn’t want light green. I knew what color I wanted. I wanted plum. A deep plum. So deep there were other colors hiding inside. When I told my mother she smiled and said, “Not a bad idea now that you say it.”

It took a few weeks for the dress to be ready. I was in agony over what style my mother and father had chosen for me. Each day when I came home from school I hovered near my mother, offering to help her chop vegetables or run an errand.

“It’s not ready, yet,” she would laugh. “Now go do your homework and leave me alone.”

Finally the day arrived. I came home late from cram school where I had spent hours preparing for my university entrance exams. It was the first evening my head had been so filled with other concerns I had forgotten about the dress.

My mother surprised me by saying, “You can go pick it up. Teiraa-san wants to do the final fitting with you there. You better hurry.”

She wasn’t coming with me. No one was coming with me. This was both a certain joy and a source of panic. I almost telephoned my cousin Emiko to come along. But decided against it. She would bear exuberant witness to my failure if the dress wasn’t all I had hoped.

I raced toward the tailor’s shop, hardly aware of people or friends I might be passing. It was already dark but the evening was warm, hinting at a long and early summer. Teiraa-san’s shop was only a few blocks from my family’s home but the distance seemed to take me forever. As I walked, I remembered his quick moving hands on me when I was a child. Measuring, always measuring. I realized suddenly he would do the same tonight. Those days I was gradually becoming aware of a confusing universe existing between men and women; a universe I knew would soon open itself up to me. But just then, the idea of anyone having access to the skin of my neck, my shoulders, my arms and then reaching around to measure my waist was enough to send a ferocious heat to my face.

I stopped outside the front door to gather my courage. This is when I saw the buttons.

Like neatly planted rows of shiny vegetables, the buttons sprouted from the garden of Teiraa-san’s carpet.  Pink ones, red ones, blue ones. Black with polka dots, orange cloth with embroidered daisies, white with gold anchors.  The buttons were everywhere. I had never seen so many. I couldn’t even push open the doorway for fear of upsetting the plastic rows. There were triangular ones and circle ones as big as my wrist. What seemed like a million little dots of light in one corner were the white ones; a starry night against the dark rug.

From amidst this mass of buttons, Teiraa-san saw me and waved me to the back door. “Go around!” He pointed left and explained, “That way, around there!”

I wove my way around to the back of the shop, stepping carefully across an unruly garden plot. The fragrance of drying herbs filled my nose. Passing his garbage cans, I suppressed the urge to peak inside. What did he eat? What did he throw away?

I greeted him again at the back door and slipped inside. Once in the shop I remembered why I had come and looked around for my dress.

Seeing my face, Teiraa-san laughed. “You must be patient!”

The buttons were everywhere along the floor. He had pushed back the racks of suits that usually made the area in the shop unbearably tight and was holding a jar of buttons and distributing them by color into rows along the floor. In his fingers were several translucent blue ones, like drops of sea foam.

He motioned for me to pick up a jar. “It won’t take very long.”

I wouldn’t have dared contradict him, although I was already tired from all my studying. I looked into the jar. There seemed to be a million of them. Yellow, green, leather-covered, silver. I could see he had sectioned off the room by color and type and size. But I was afraid to walk around to place the buttons from my jar.

“No, it’s easy. Watch.” He was wearing only tabi-socks and the split between his big toe and the rest of his feet seemed impossibly wide. He stepped out onto the carpet and I looked closer. There were indeed footpaths between the planted buttons, just wide enough to step into with a bare foot. I removed my shoes and reached into the jar.

We worked for an hour and I tested the quality of the buttons between the tips of my fingers before laying them down in their rows. The black ones were the most difficult to arrange. Some had differences so slight it was impossible to distinguish them. A delicate groove, a slight smoky tone, barely visible flecks of silver beneath the black plastic. My favorite, however, were the oversized buttons fashionable at that time. When I found a plum colored one, the color of the fabric I had picked out for my dress, I held it for a moment in my hand. It was a smooth flat disk the size of a persimmon; the edge contained a delicate scalloping with indents the exact size of my fingers.

Teiraa-san saw my preoccupation with the button. “You have a good eye, that is the partner of the button I chose to fasten the sash of your dress. Now it is without a mate. You can put it in that tin on the window.” An old cigarette tin lay open on the sill. More buttons, presumably other matchless ones lay scattered inside like paint drops against the shiny metal.

“May I have it?” I asked, certain suddenly I had to have this matching button.

He watched me carefully. “That’s maybe a good idea. In case you lose the first one.”

My mind raced to why I might lose the matching button that was already on my dress and of course the only scene I came up with involved someone else’s hands. Someone else’s hands in a hurry to untie the sash. I gripped the button between my fingers.

Teiraa-san smiled quietly, knowingly, and went back to work sorting buttons. He began humming to himself under his breath.

Teiraa-san was probably in his late forties by then, an old man to me. But his hair was still very black and the skin on his face unlined. I understood that many women thought he was still handsome. Although when they mentioned this fact, it was always in passing and the idea quickly dropped for another seemingly more important one. He was ‘handsome’ but he was ‘unfortunate’ too.

By then I was well aware of the story behind Teiraa-san’s misfortune. I had heard it in the same way everyone in town had heard it – through snippets of conversation while my mother had tea with a neighbor, at the supermarket when two women bent their heads together at the sight of his lean figure passing the window, once even my father made reference to it after a visit to Teiraa-san’s shop.

Her name was Haruko Tanaka and she moved to Ebino with her family when Teiraa-san was a young man. Most people say she was stunning. My mother says this isn’t really the case, but people love to remember her this way. Apparently, she was delicate and most likely her fragility is what made her so attractive. Within a year of the Tanaka’s arrival, the two families began to have discussions and soon enough Haruko and the tailor were engaged. Some people say the young couple spent many evenings that first spring admiring the fireflies together near the gorge. And that after their engagement was announced publicly they were seen eating dinner together nearly every night, either with his family or with hers. They also say they were once caught skinny dipping in Lake Ohnami.

Things didn’t go well for Teiraa-san and Haruko Tanaka. It was soon discovered in town that the Tanaka’s had moved to Ebino from a suburb of Hiroshima. This fact had obviously been left out of the marriage negotiations. As expected, Teiraa-san’s family withdrew their support.

Some people tell it that Teiraa-san wasn’t swayed by the information. Others say that it was out of a sense of duty that he remained with her. He’d given his word and would not back down. I like to imagine that after the bad news about her origins hit Ebino, Teiraa-san and Haruko passed their evenings in discussion. They weighed their options. Maybe they would avoid having children. Maybe they read medical journals and compared her position in kilometers from the blast to concentric circles of radiation sickness patterns. Maybe they didn’t care and just wanted what all young couples who are in love want. To discover everything there is to know about one another without interference. But none of this mattered in the end. Haruko died of ovarian cancer a few months before their wedding and the Tanaka’s moved away, probably back to Hiroshima where their other children might have some hope of marriage someday.

I finished sorting the buttons and wondered why Teiraa-san never married after losing a fiancé. Being so young I assumed true love came only once and since the tailor had missed his chance, he’d never had another one. This idea appealed to me that day as I waited nervously to be shown the dress that would, I was sure, decide my own romantic fate.

We had finished sorting all the jars and stood for a moment among the fields of shiny plastic color. At my feet were the yellows in a gradual array from cream to mustard. I had a sudden and unexplainable urge to dance across them, to kick the little plastic discs into the air like rice scattered at a festival. I contented myself with touching a few of them with the tips of my toes. Teiraa-san finished a swathe of blues, pushing the tiny buttons into neat lines with his long fingers. He turned in a circle to survey the room.

“Yes,” he said. “That will do.” And then he began gathering them up by color, by type, by size and depositing them in a box, that I saw after further inspection contained an assortment of smaller glass jars. He worked fast, bending and scooping the puddles of buttons, until finally the room was clean again and now seemed suddenly, disappointingly, devoid of color.

“You see, Ayaka-chan,” he began. “That didn’t take too long did it?”

“Not at all,” I agreed, wondering whether I would ever see my dress. “I never imagined there could be so many different buttons. How do you ever decide which ones to use?”

He stared at the box of now-sorted buttons. “It’s hard, the wrong button can ruin a piece of clothing. You have to lay everything out, go all the way to the end before you really know what you have, what you want.” He fingered the buttons, his mouth pinched. “Thank you. That was a great help.”

And yes, the dress was perfect and I wore it well at the dance. I kept in my handbag the extra plum button that Teiraa-san gave me. Just in case.

            When I got the news that Teiraa-san had passed away, I was already divorced and living alone with my two daughters in Miyazaki. We spent most weekends at my parents house in Kobayashi anyway, so I didn’t even consider not going. It was August and the typhoon season was well underway. Everyone on Kyushu was waiting for a large typhoon the news stations were promising but as yet we’d only had a continual barrage of small lifeless storms that heated the air to an uncomfortable dampness and then never really blew themselves away.

On the hour-long drive to Kobayashi my oldest daughter considered the particular reason we were returning to my home town that weekend. She was twelve and had met Teiraa-san several times. He even made her a dress once to wear as a flower girl in a cousin’s wedding. “It must be very sad to die,” she said, watching out the window. She had her father’s voice; she’d had this from her tiniest childhood.

I reminded her that Teiraa-san couldn’t be sad. He was gone. He was peaceful.

“But I’m sure he’s not gone, gone, mother,” she sighed, confident I was wrong. “He’s a spirit now.”

This is when my younger daughter, eight years old, piped in, “If he’s a spirit, do you think then that he can fly? That would be wonderful to fly.”

This set the two of them off on a discussion about where they would fly to and how long it would take to get there. And whether it would be more tiring than running, for example.

At the funeral I paid my respects to Teiraa-san’s ashes, lighting a stick of incense for his urn and pausing for a moment to remember him. I had not seen him much in the years since I moved to Miyazaki; it seemed each time I returned he was older, quieter. He’d grown a slight humpback and lost some of his elegance. But not his energy. He’d worked right up until a few months before his death. There was a rumor a few years back that Kato Tokiko, the famous folk singer, had even ordered a dress from him for a concert. But the type of dresses he made had mostly fallen out of style.

Even though I saw him rarely, each time I did run into him he was always polite. And he never forgot my name.

“Good evening, Ayaka-chan,” he would say in passing. He never used my married name and I liked this about him, especially after my divorce. For just a fleeting moment I wasn’t someone who had changed her identity and then somehow misplaced it.

After the funeral, my cousin Emiko and I sipped icy cold mugi-cha on the back porch of the Nishikokubaru house. A flock of pheasants pecked the ground at the outer perimeter of the small yard. My daughters, along with some other children, were chasing the birds and hooting with delight. I had never seen Teiraa-san’s family home and it seemed too quiet, too austere. There was only one sister of the family still living, the youngest one, and she flapped among the guests in a black dress I was certain Teiraa-san had not made. Whenever she passed us, Emiko would lower her voice to barely a whisper but she did not interrupt her story.

“He was supposed to be a doctor, but he failed the exams twice.”

This surprised me as I’d always considered Teiraa-san one of the more learned men in Ebino of his generation.

Emiko rolled her eyes to signal her impatience but I didn’t take this personally. She had become impatient with the world in the last few years. “Think about it. Did you ever see him write anything down? What about a cash register? Did you think he was just old-fashioned?”

“He didn’t know how to read?”

She shook her head. “No, dyslexic. But for a man of his generation he was for all intents and purposes illiterate. They wouldn’t have helped him much at school. No math. No writing.” This news was a surprise and made me feel, for the first time, real pity for Teiraa-san. “But,” Emiko continued. “No one would dare say he wasn’t a talented tailor. He was amazing.”

She paused in her story to remind her son not to fall in the pond. From somewhere in the house behind us I could hear my father shouting a joke. In a few seconds a room full of people erupted in peals of laughter. Teiraa-san’s sister paused in her task of filling a plate with crackers to cock her head and smile. Emiko and I bowed slightly to her.

Afterward, my cousin leaned further into me. I could smell the lavender shampoo she had used since we were teenagers. “Do you remember when Ken went to Australia on business last month and I brought Shuji here with me and stayed with my mother?”

I nodded.

“Teiraa-san had just gone into the hospital and my mother, who was visiting Auntie Naoko after her surgery, stopped to see him too. When she got home she mentioned he had been in a bad mood. She was surprised. For someone who’d gone through so much.”

“Poor old Teiraa-san,” I found myself saying, as if by rote.

“She told me he must have terrific regrets about his life. I disagreed with her right away because I think of him as such a successful person.” At this point, Emiko tossed her hair over one shoulder and looked beyond the children. I knew she was thinking of her husband, Ken, and the trouble he’d had keeping a stable job.

Another shout from my father inside the house interrupted us and Emiko shook her head in exasperation. We both thought it was inappropriate that my father, in his 89^th year, was still unable to dampen his vocal cords in certain situations. I could see some of the guests were starting to trickle away.

“So?” I prompted Emi, wanting to hear the rest of her story.

She looked me right in the eye and said, “It’s like I said, he never wanted to be a tailor. He wanted to be a doctor.” She paused for a second, keeping me in suspense. “And Haruko didn’t die of cancer.”

This new pronouncement seemed ridiculous. Here we were discussing someone neither one of us had ever met. And with such fervency and discretion. I was reminded of that stifling small town atmosphere I had begun to hate as a younger woman, an atmosphere I believed, with hindsight, propelled me to marry young. To escape at all costs.

“How did she die, then?”

“Apparently, she threw herself in the river.”

“How sad,” I said instinctively, yet I was blindsided for the briefest of flashes by the memory of my own years-earlier depression. I’d stayed indoors for nearly three months, not sleeping and not eating, filling the hours with crossword puzzles and magazines. This period of my life ended suddenly when my youngest daughter decided to drag me outside on the pretense that the street was flooding. With kittens, no less, an invention I am particularly proud of her for now. “Why did she do that?”

“She had cancer, of course. That part of the story isn’t a total lie. But, just wait, there’s more.”

“Emi,” I chided. “This is a sad story. Try at least to sound like you know that.”

She made a face at me but then catching a glimpse of her son chasing my youngest daughter with a fistful of fireflies that illuminated his hand with each collective breath I could see a sliver of chagrin pass across her features. When she spoke again her tone was quiet. Respectful.

“I guess Teiraa-san somehow realized what she was trying to do and he tried to save her. But he didn’t make it in time and she was stuck too far under when he reached the river. He wasn’t even able to pull her out. Instead he fell in himself and some men were called to help him get out. He was sick for months.”

“Why don’t people talk about this part of the story?” I asked her, thinking how many times I’d heard the tale of Haruko and Teiraa-san’s unfortunate engagement.

Emiko shrugged her shoulders and the question hung between us. Yet I knew that I, too, would always choose to remember his story a different way.

We were interrupted then by our Aunt Naoko, our mothers’ youngest sister, who was getting tired and wanted a lift back to her house. Emiko agreed to take her and I stayed behind for a short while longer.

I stood outside alone, in the darkening light that finally forebode the typhoon promised by the news stations, and watched my daughters. They had released the fireflies and were sprawled on their backs in the grass with their eyes closed. Another child, a boy, was tickling their noses with a long blade of wheat grass and I surmised quickly that the first one to laugh out loud would have to suffer some punishment. Their faces, both of which looked so much like their father’s, were scrunched into the delightful grimace of someone trying incredibly hard not to laugh but who wants very much, at the same time, to let free a spectacular whoop of joy.