Lettering sketch of a quote on a banner

I was twenty and had come to the workshop above the chandler's to learn gilding, not quotations. The client was Mrs Okonedo, who ran the laundrette on Harbour Row and wanted the words painted over her door before the autumn fair. She had written the sentence on the back of a bus ticket: Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. Dennis read it twice, sniffed, and said it sounded like something a person says after the second glass of sherry.

Every morning he sharpened the red pencil, drew a flourish, then sat back to look at the grey column against the window. On the Wednesday he handed me the eraser and told me to take out the word yesterday. I refused, and he laughed and took it back. He rubbed the whole word away in one long stroke, leaving a smudge of graphite and a clean oval of paper where the banner had been.

Mrs Okonedo came on the Friday, looked at the empty space, and asked where the rest had gone. 'Tomorrow, mostly,' Dennis said. She paid him in coins, and when she had gone I swept the rubber crumbs into my palm. They were grey as old pencil, and I could not have said which of them had been the worry.