Beautiful in flowing hand lettering

The Mackie girl came into the shop on Tuesday wanting her name over the door of the new hairdresser's, and I nearly dropped the tin of gilt when she asked for it in that Italian style, all swoops. Dad would have sent her packing. Instead I sat her on the stool by the bench and showed her the hand he taught us, the one where the pen runs out at the end of each letter like line paying out from a reel.

While I was doing it I thought of his practice sheets in the biscuit tin under the bench. Every page had the same word on it, over and over, because he said a sign-writer had to make one good word before he was fit to make a shop. Beautiful, always beautiful. He never said why. The b with its hooked loop, the long tail on the t, the f that dips below the line as if it's hunting for something it dropped.

Last spring the doctor told him his hand would go by the autumn. He said nothing to anyone. He came in before dawn with a jar of black ink and wrote the word across the inside of the old window at the Crown, the one nobody can see from the street. I found it when I scraped the glass for the new frame, and I stood there with the blade in my hand for a good minute.

So I'm not scraping it off. A word nobody reads is still a word somebody wrote, and I reckon that's the point of it. Come home at Easter before the landlord has the whole thing painted over. Bring your camera if you have one. Your loving sister, Ada