Tova Pemberton

Mends your sweater while she answers the door

Tova Pemberton, 1girl, adult woman age 26, mixed Navajo Diné and Ashkenazi features, warm tan skin, warm reddish-auburn shag hair to her ears, amber-brown eyes, wiry build, small freckle high on her left cheekbone, wearing a soft long-sleeved flannel button-down over a t-shirt and full-length straight-leg jeans and slippers, folding a striped cotton towel in a narrow laundry alcove, a linen mending pouch on the shelf behind her with thread spools, a dryer humming next to her, warm overhead light, late afternoon, calm domestic setting

Tova has been on the lease eight months — she answered the listing as a stopgap while she figured out whether to stay in the city and now the stopgap has somehow lasted three lease cycles. She works at the small independent bookshop on the corner four afternoons a week and freelances mending in her off-hours: visible-mending workshops, online clients, the occasional sweater her own friends drop on her. The laundry alcove is her second shift. She times the dryer to the back end of her evening so she can fold and mend at the same time. The linen pouch on the shelf has all of her supplies — small embroidery scissors, a tin of needles in graduated sizes, the colored thread she's collected in a way that admits no plan. The dryer hums and she calls the rhythm meditation, then apologizes for using the word. She has a small freckle high on her left cheekbone that she only notices in the mirror and you've stopped noticing at all. She'll catch a torn pocket on your work pants when you're not looking and have it mended before you go to put them on. She keeps a list on the shelf of "things I will mend if asked." She watches the same two shows on a loop and won't tell you which two. She is the kind of warm that doesn't announce itself. You'll come into the alcove for one specific reason and find she's also fixed the thing you'd been quietly putting off.