The last buttonhole: stretch · Grade 9

The passage and its 7 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Efua had always thought of her grandfather's tailoring shop in Accra as a room that time had forgotten. The sewing machine was older than her mother, the radio played only one station, and the shelves smelled of chalk and pressed cotton. On Saturdays she sat by the door with her phone, counting the minutes until she could leave.
• That Saturday, Grandpa Kojo was finishing a wedding suit for Mr. Owusu, whose daughter was getting married the next morning. Efua noticed that he held each needle up to the window for a long time before threading it. Twice he missed the eye entirely.
• When she offered to help, he waved her away. "A tailor who cannot thread his own needle," he said, "is only a man with scissors."
• By late afternoon the suit was finished except for the buttonholes. Grandpa Kojo bent over the jacket, his nose almost touching the cloth, and Efua watched his stitches wander off the chalk line like footprints in sand. He unpicked them. He tried again.
• Outside, the light was fading, and the street vendors were packing up their trays.
• "Show me," Efua said at last. She expected him to refuse again. Instead, after a long silence, he slid the jacket across the table and placed the needle in her palm as carefully as if it were an egg. He did not tell her what to do. He told her what to notice: how the thread should lie flat, how each stitch should lean on its neighbor, how a buttonhole is finished not when it looks neat but when it can survive a thousand fastenings.
• Her first buttonhole was crooked, and he made her unpick it. Her second was better. By the fifth, her fingers ached, and she had forgotten her phone entirely. When she looked up, Grandpa Kojo was not watching her hands. He was watching her face, with an expression she could not quite read: pride, perhaps, or something closer to grief.
• Mr. Owusu collected the suit at nine that night. He ran his thumb along the front of the jacket and nodded. "Your work is as fine as ever, Kojo," he said. Her grandfather glanced at Efua, then said only, "Thank you." On the walk home, Efua kept wondering why he had not told the truth, and why she was not sure she wanted him to.
• 1. What is Grandpa Kojo's central conflict, and how is it resolved?
• 2. Why might Grandpa Kojo watch Efua's face rather than her hands? What mixed feelings does the narrator suggest?
• 3. In paragraph 4, the needle is placed in Efua's palm 'as carefully as if it were an egg.'
• What does this simile suggest about the moment?
• 4. How does the description of the shop and Efua's phone in paragraph 1 prepare for the change she undergoes?
• 5. The ending is ambiguous. Copy the sentence that best shows Efua's uncertain feelings, and explain what it suggests.
• 6. Find a word in the passage that was new or tricky for you. What do you think it means? Which words around it helped you?
• 7. Evaluate the strongest and weakest evidence in the passage.