The repaired coat

On the morning of the interview, Rosa found a folded note inside her coat pocket. It said only: The left seam should hold now. Beneath the words, her father had drawn a small arrow, as if the seam might otherwise be difficult to locate. She put her hand inside the pocket and felt the new line of stitches. They were uneven but close together. The bus was due in twelve minutes. She checked the mirror, lifted the collar and remembered the sound of the sewing machine after she had gone to bed.

The previous evening she had dropped the coat onto a kitchen chair. The lining had torn when her keys caught in it. Her father offered to mend it, and she said it did not matter. He was already reaching for the sewing box. Rosa told him that she could manage one interview without everybody treating it as an emergency. He put the box down. They ate without returning to the subject. Later she found an ironed shirt hanging on her door and felt irritated by that too, although she put it carefully over the back of her chair.

At the bus stop, she read the note again. Her father had worked nights in a clothing factory before the factory closed. She knew this as a fact about the family, like the year they had moved house. She had never asked what he had actually made there. Looking at the uneven stitches, she wondered whether the machine had been difficult to see under the kitchen light. The bus arrived and she folded the note along its original crease. During the journey, she practised the first sentence of her introduction without speaking.

The interview lasted twenty minutes. Rosa answered one question well and another less clearly than she wanted. Nobody looked inside her coat. Afterwards she sat in the small park opposite the building and called home. Her father asked whether she was finished. She said yes, then began to describe the questions. Before she reached the one she had struggled with, she thanked him for the pocket. There was a short silence. He said the repair might need another row of stitching when she got back. She asked him to show her how.

Two days later, the email arrived while they were both in the kitchen. She had not been offered the job. Her father began to speak, then waited. Rosa read the message twice and put the phone face down. After a while she brought the coat from the hallway. They sat with the seam turned towards the window, and he showed her how to keep the fabric flat beneath the needle. The repair did not change the email. It gave them something useful to do while she decided where to apply next.

Consider the whole passage. How does the writer structure the text to develop Rosa’s understanding of her father’s help? You could consider the opening, movement between different times, recurring objects, and the ending. Support your analysis with references to the passage.