The Sum is Greater

The three old ladies sat in the semi-darkness, sewing. There was a tray on a table in front of them, piled high with spools of different colored threads. In their baskets, lay beating, broken, cracked and oozing, liquid-dripping, red and panting, construction-paper-laced, edges faded, torn and unraveling hearts.

The sign on the front door read: “Hearts, Mended. Inquire within.” Once clear and bright in gold leaf, the paint was now chipped and missing bits of serif. The hours had long been erased. There was a tinkling bell over the door. The carpet had been worn by thousands of footfalls.

How do you mend a broken heart?

It takes recognition first. That the heart isn’t merely strained. That it isn’t just bruised, or something that chocolate would heal, or a good night’s sleep could make better. The heart has to be damaged to the extreme to end up here, waiting for its turn to be sewn back together.

Although, the women will tell you as soon as you enter that no, they can’t perfectly fix what has been stomped or tossed or pulverized or shredded or imploded. They can’t make a heart as good as new. The best they can do, in the dark little shop front, on a forgotten side street in the wrong part of town is offer a patched and darned job. The hand sewing has grown a little less precise over the years. There are gaps now where there once was only a row of tiny stitches fine enough for couture. Age has taken a toll on the trio. But they work without cease nevertheless.

Sometimes people bring in their stapled-together hearts. Their home-remedied hearts. Hearts they tried to weld themselves in their garage. Or bake in a glass. Tried to superglue or rubber cement. Sometimes the hearts have been ossified, desiccated, scented with moth-balls, coated in glitter.

The women hold the hearts in their hands. They turn the hearts beneath the 30-watt bulb. They bring the hearts to their ears and listen and nod as the organs whisper every forlorn secret, every tragic curse.

These are the women who can fix a broken heart. With magic thread and murmured incantations as they solemnly quietly seriously pierce the needle through the willing waiting desperate flesh, to make whole what has been rendered broken.

Their business is basic. Like bringing in laundry or dry cleaning.

You drop off your heart, live without for however long it takes for the menders to mend, the sisters of mercy to work their mysterious tricks, and then you return, pay in the way they demand, and continue on with your life. Changed, obviously. Not the same. It’s the never the same.

But once there was an error in housekeeping. Bill-keeping. Accounts receivable. Once there was an error, and when Simone went in to claim her heart, her little paper ticket trembling in her hand, they gave her Simon E.’s by accident. And when Simon came in to find his, they saw the error in their ways, but they would not admit to fault. What it would do to business would be unfathomable. They simply gave him hers, and helped him to stick it back in place, and promised themselves they would tell no other soul, and each had an extra tipple that night before bed.

Simone lay awake. She lay awake and stared at the ceiling and told herself fantasy stories of how things might have gone differently if only.

Simon walked the streets. He walked the streets and thought of what he had not said, never said, should have said, hung his head.

The trio had used gold thread in Simon’s heart and silver in Simone’s. The stitches were as neat as ever, but there were some jagged parts where the hearts had been worn too thin to save by darning, and a patch was employed.

The women never talked while they sewed. They performed their job in the semi-darkness, in the cool storefront that had been in the same location for decades as buildings rose and fell around them. As technology advanced. As civilizations declined.

Simone got out of bed when it was obvious sleep wouldn’t come. Her thoughts were jumbled. She brewed a fresh pot of Oolong in her tiny kitchen. Poured a cup into a chipped thrift-store mug. She tried to remember the man who had broken her heart, but she couldn’t place his name. She tried to remember how it had felt when he’d said goodbye for the final time, but those memories were erased by tiny stitches.

She stared out the window and saw the lights of the night and saw the windows in the apartment across the way and thought “every window holds a broken heart.”

Simon wandered in a part of the city he’d never been to before. He did not even know why he was here. The sidewalk glittered in the moonlight. Bedraggled begonias tried their best to bloom in terra-cotta pots on a stoop he passed by. There was the scent of wisteria in the air, the vine clinging to a trellis. The scent intoxicating, damning.

As he walked, he saw images of a sandy-haired man with an easy-going smile but no light in his eyes. A man who forgot birthdays and anniversaries. A man who made a lonely woman weep.

As Simone puttered in her apartment, she had flashes of a redheaded temptress. A confident vixen who took love for granted. Who made eyes at the maitre d’. Who once slept with a chef between courses.

The women who sewed had gotten older but they did not believe in errors. They did not believe in mistakes. And maybe Simon had been given Simone’s heart in place of his own. And maybe Simone had been handed Simon’s. But maybe that is the way the world wanted them to continue. With a beat that entwined them both.

Ivy grew up the sides of Simone’s building. In a fairy tale, he would have climbed the strands. Instead, he looked at the numbers and names and he pressed the one that showed up as a heart to him. Red and pulsing. Number 117.

She said, “Hello?” with a whisper.

He said, “I think I have something that’s yours.”

She could feel the metallic threads inside of her chest pulling, grasping. There was something almost beyond her abilities to comprehend reality that made her press the button to buzz in a stranger.

When he reached her apartment, the door was ajar. She was standing just inside, wearing a long white button-up shirt, her hair in a messy bun, her eyes yearning. He entered the small studio and shut the door behind and leaned against it.

He said, “I don’t know why I’m here, and I don’t know who you are, and I know this will sound strange…”

“But your heart led you to me?”

He nodded.

“I think there might have been a mistake,” she said, “because when I close my eyes, all I see are piano keys.”

He smiled. “I play.” And then he said, “And when I close my eyes, all I see are watercolors.”

She pointed to her easel. He said, “I see goldenrod and ultramarine. I see violet and lemon. Cerulean and indigo.”

She sat on the floor. He slid to a crouch. “Who broke yours?” she said.

“I can’t remember her name.”

“I can’t remember his either.”

“It's a weird sensation, isn’t it?” she asked. “All I could think of and breathe and remember was the way he did something. The way he said something. And all of that seems to have been erased, and I think…”

“I think about your guy in a way that I have never thought of a man. With loss and dismay. So I think that I have yours and you must have mine, and what if that’s…”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“More than okay. Maybe it’s the way it’s…”

“Supposed to be.”

“You brought your heart to be mended.”

He nodded. She reached out her hand. The stitches in his heart disappeared. The ones that held her ragged edges together became transparent. Their fingers laced. They moved closer to one another.

“Can I?” he asked. “May I?”

And she said, “Kiss me.”

The women mend the broken hearts. They finish one, and reach for the next in the basket. The hearts are never put back together in the same way. But every so often the sum is greater than the parts.