"Three times," she said. "Drive carefully. The light goes so early now."
I sat in my car in her driveway with the engine running and the heater blowing on my shins and thought about that. Three times. My high school graduation, my college graduation. I tried to think when the third time could have been. I couldn't. I put it down to her age, to her way of saying things for effect. Then I drove home down Lane Avenue past the campus in the blue dusk, and called my father, and it went to voicemail, because he was on the floor of the warehouse forty feet in the air on his reach truck, and I said, "Hi, Dad, it's me, call me when you get off, okay, I don't care how late," and he didn't call, and at twelve-forty in the morning I got a text that said, Home safe. Proud of you. Get some sleep. And nothing else.
For a week we were careful with each other, which was worse than if he had yelled. He called on Wednesday, the way he always called on Wednesdays, on his dinner break, from the picnic table behind the warehouse where the smokers went, and I could hear the beep of trucks backing up behind him and somebody laughing. He asked if I'd eaten. He told me Mr. Oakes next door, the last of the original neighbors, had gotten a new beagle and named it Pretzel too. He did not mention the suit. Neither did I. When I tried, when I said, "Dad, about Monday," he said, "Laney, it's fine. I got to go, they're calling us back," and hung up, and I sat in the break room on the ninth floor of the courthouse, where I was finishing out my clerkship that fall, and looked at my phone until the screen went dark.
It was not fine. I knew him well enough to know the shape of a thing that was not fine.
I got the idea from Malcolm Wendt, without his knowing it. He sent an email the Friday after the swearing-in, to all six of the incoming associates, about the firm's new associate reception in the second week of January, which was held every year in the big conference room on the thirty-first floor of the Huntington Center with the windows that looked out over the river and the Scioto Mile. Families welcome, the email said. Partners and their spouses will attend. Business attire. It was a nice email. I read it four times. Then I thought about my father coming to that conference room in the six-button jacket and the pleated trousers and the white socks, and I thought about Lisbet with the silver bob putting her hand on Malcolm's forearm, and I decided that I would buy my father a suit.
A real one. Not something off a rack at Kohl's that would hang off his shoulders like a garment bag. A suit made for him, or at least made over for him, by someone who knew what they were doing, so that when he walked into that room on the thirty-first floor nobody would have to take care that their face did not change.
I told myself this was an apology. I'm still not sure how much of it was.
The problem was that it had to be a surprise, because if I asked him he would say no. My father did not accept gifts that cost more than a tank of gas. So I could not take him to be measured. I needed his measurements without him. And the only thing I could think of was the suit itself, which had been, whatever else it was, made to fit him at some point, or altered to, and from which a decent tailor could take a pattern.
A woman I clerked alongside told me about a tailor in Clintonville named Sarkis Avedian, with a shop on High Street next to a place that sold bubble tea. "He's ancient, and kind of a grouch," she said. "But he's the only one in town who still does real handwork."
So on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, when I knew my father was working a day shift because the warehouse was running double for the holiday rush, I let myself into the duplex on Weber Road with the key I'd had on my ring since I was nine years old.