On Tuesday morning Eszter pulled her blue coat off the hook and pushed one arm into a sleeve, then the other. Something was wrong near her tummy. Two fingers went straight through a hole.
“Grandma,” she said. “My coat has a window.”
Grandma left the porridge and came to look. “So it has. A button is missing.”
“Where did it go?”
“That is the question,” said Grandma. “Breakfast first. Buttons are easier to look for with a full tummy.”
They ate porridge with honey. Eszter kept her hand on the hole, the way you hold a loose tooth with your tongue.
After breakfast they searched. Grandma looked under the table. Eszter looked behind the boots by the door. They lifted the rug in the hall and found a dried leaf and a hairpin.
“No button,” said Eszter.
Grandma fetched the tin from the top shelf. It was a round tin that had once held peppermints.
“Every coat in this family has left a button here,” she said.
They tipped the tin out on the table. Buttons rolled in every direction. Eszter put them in rows.
A white one, small as a pea. Four brown ones, all the same size. One green one, shaped like a flower. A silver one that came off Grandpa’s Sunday jacket. A tiny pink one from the jacket Eszter wore home from the hospital, when she was so small that the sleeves had been folded twice.
Eszter held each brown one against the coat, next to the empty space where the button used to sit. None of them was right.
“This one is too dark,” she said.
“This one is too big,” said Grandma.
“This one has eight holes, and my coat wants four.”
Grandma put the lid back and pushed the tin to the middle of the table.
“We can walk to the shop after lunch,” she said. “They keep buttons in a jar by the till. We will find one that fits.”
Eszter did not answer. She looked at the floor and moved her toe along one line of the tiles.
“What is it?” asked Grandma.
“I know where the button is,” said Eszter. “But I don’t know where it is.”
Grandma sat down and folded her hands.
“On Sunday,” said Eszter, “it was hanging by one thread. It wobbled when I walked. So I twisted it off. I did not want to lose it.”
“And then?”
“I put it in my pocket. I was going to give it to you. But then Máté next door called me to see the frog, and I forgot.”
She pushed her hand into the pocket of the blue coat. Her fingers went round and round. A sweet paper. A piece of string. The corner of a chestnut. She pulled everything out on the table and spread it flat: the paper, the string, the chestnut, half a leaf.
Then her fingers touched something small and round at the very bottom of the pocket, in the seam where the cloth folds over. It had slipped in there and stayed.
She pulled it out. Round, brown, four holes, with a little flower cut into the middle.
“There it is,” she said quietly.
Grandma took the button and turned it in her fingers.
“You did the right thing, telling me,” she said. “You could have said nothing, and we would have walked to the shop, and I would never have known.”
“I thought you would be cross.”
“About a button? No. About the pocket?” She looked into the pocket. “Yes. Bring me a needle.”
Eszter brought the needle and the blue thread. Grandma threaded it, holding the needle up against the window. Eszter stood very still and pulled the coat straight, one hand on each side of the hole, the way she held the paper when Grandma cut out stars.
The needle went up and down. Four holes, four times each. Grandma wound the thread round the stem and tied it off with two small knots.
“Now, hold it,” she said.
Eszter pressed her thumb on the button. It was warm from being held. It sat flat and firm, the way it must have sat on the coat on the day the coat was made.
“Try the window,” said Grandma.
Eszter put two fingers at the hole. The cloth was closed. Only the button was there, round and neat, with its little flower.
Then they cleared the table and put the buttons back in the tin, one row at a time. The white one, the brown ones, the green flower, the silver one from Grandpa’s jacket, the pink one from the hospital. Grandma pressed the lid down until it clicked.
After lunch Eszter put on the blue coat and went out to the gate. The air smelled of wet stone. At the corner she stopped and touched the button. She walked on. At the bakery she touched it again. At the bench by the bus stop she touched it a third time.
It stayed.
On the way home she met Máté, who wanted to show her the frog again. The frog was under the same stone, in the same corner of the yard. Eszter looked at it for a while, and then she put her hand in her pocket, just to be sure, and the pocket was empty.
She laughed, and went in to tell Grandma.
