The Crimson Thread by Suzanne Weyn Page A

chicken coops were stacked atop one another and hens laid eggs that went instantly on sale. She wanted to buy three for breakfast. Ray took out a leather wallet. “Can I help?” he offered.
                Bertie waved him off. “You’ve already helped more than I can repay. What do you do that you always have so much money?”
                He grinned. “I’m a burglar, remember?”
                “I’m sorry I said that.”
                “You are forgiven. I am a tailor by day, and by night I am excellent at cards and so increase my day’s wage.”
                “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose your day’s wage instead?” she asked, talking the paper bag of eggs from the vendor.
                “Not meaning to boast, but…I never lose.”
                She laughed at his bravado. “Is that so?”
                “It’s true,” he confirmed.
                “And how did you learn to be a tailor?” she asked, continuing to walk on toward home.
                A distant look swept across his face for a moment before he spoke. “It is a long and pitiful story,” he said with a bitter laugh. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”
                “I’m sure.”
                He told her that as a young boy of about seven he had been sold to a traveling carnival show by his parents, who were so poor that they could not feed him. At the carnival he had worked as an acrobat, a juggler, and a tightrope walker.
                “That’s why you can swing around on the fire escape like that,” she realized.
                He nodded. “We traveled all through Europe and Russia. I worked with a magician, too. I know lots of magic. I became better than the magician I assisted, so one night he knocked me out and left me behind on the side of the road. It was in Moscow, I think, I was nine.”
                “How terrible,” she said with a gasp. “What did you do?”
                “the only thing I could,” he replied. “I stood on corners and juggled and walked on my hands and flipped in the air for what coins people would throw at me. Those coins were enough for me to buy a piece of bread and sometimes a blanket so I wouldn’t freeze to death on the park benches where I slept.”
                “How did you get to America?”
                “I stowed away on a steamer. I was doing my usual tricks in the park – ”
                “The one with the torch?” she interrupted.
                “Yes, but the torch wasn’t there then. I was dirty and raggedy and not too many people wanted to stop to see me in that condition, so I wasn’t doing too well. Then, one day, a tailor who I had seen watching me for about a week came along and took me by the filthy shirt collar and said, “You will work with me. I will teach you to be a tailor.”
                “He adopted you, then?”
                “Yes and no. His wife cleaned me up and fed me. But I lived and worked in the shop. It was my whole life. A funny thing happened too. As I learned, I began to remember my life as a child when I was very young. I recalled things that I had forgotten, such as that my grandmother was a spinner and I would help her spin the wool in the barn behind where we once lived. And I remembered my parents sewing inside our small home.”
                “And now you’re a tailor,” she said.
                “Yes, it was as though I was meant to be in the garment trade, ad no amount of strange turns on life’s path could change the fact.”
                “Life is strange,” Bertie remarked.
                “It is, indeed,” he agreed thoughtfully.
                “Do you still live at the tailor shop?”
                “No, that shop closed when