The patch was supposed to be temporary.
That’s what I told Daniel, anyway. He was thirteen, and he’d come home from school with a long tear across the front of his denim jacket, right over the chest pocket. He’d climbed the chain-link fence behind the gas station on Garfield Avenue to get a baseball back, and the top of the fence caught him on the way down.
He stood in the kitchen doorway holding the torn flap of fabric against his chest like he was holding in his own heart.
“Mom,” he said. “Can you fix it? Please? I know it’s ruined. But can you try?”
That jacket was the only nice thing he owned. I’d bought it for his twelfth birthday at the Sears in the mall, on layaway, two dollars a week for four months. He wore it every single day. To school. To church. To bed, once, when he had the flu and said it made him feel better.
“Give it here,” I said.
I didn’t have any denim to patch it with. I didn’t have money to buy any. But I had a scrap of red canvas left over from a Halloween costume, and I had my mother’s old sewing kit, and I had a whole Saturday afternoon.
I cut the red canvas into the shape of a little sailboat. A triangle sail and a curved hull. I don’t know why I picked a sailboat. We’d never been on a boat in our lives. We lived in a two-room apartment above a laundromat in Toledo, Ohio, about as far from the ocean as you can get. I think I just wanted to give him something that looked like it was going somewhere.
I stitched it over the tear with white thread. It came out crooked. The sail leaned to the left like it was caught in a strong wind. One of the stitches on the bottom of the hull was bigger than the others.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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