The house was very quiet and very clean, as if he were living in the smallest possible amount of it. The kitchen with its yellow linoleum and the calendar from the auto parts store on the wall, with his shifts written in the squares in pencil in his square block capitals, and on the Monday of my swearing-in, in the same pencil, circled twice: LANEY. 10 AM. PALACE. BROAD ST. And below it, in smaller letters, as if added later: SUIT.
I stood looking at that for a while.
His bedroom was at the back of the house. The closet door stuck the way it always had, and you had to lift it a little on the knob to slide it. Inside, his work jackets hung in a row, four of them, all the same tan canvas with his name stitched over the pocket in red, and the flannel shirts, and a fleece I had bought him once at Target that I had never seen him wear. And at the very back of the closet, at the end of the rod, in a fresh dry cleaner's bag this time, clear and crinkling, with a pink paper ticket stapled to the hanger from the cleaner's on Cleveland Avenue, dated the Tuesday after my swearing-in, was the suit.
He'd had it cleaned. He'd worn it once, for three hours, and he'd taken it to be cleaned and brought it home and hung it back up at the very back of his closet, carefully, in its bag, where nobody would see it.
I took it down. It was heavier than I expected. Old wool, real wool, the kind they do not use anymore for suits that cost what this one must have cost. I laid it on his bed, on the tan chenille bedspread, and looked at it in the light from the window, and I felt something I did not have a word for, and I put it back in the bag and carried it out to my car and drove it to Clintonville.
Sarkis Avedian's shop was very small and very warm and smelled of steam and pressing cloths and the sharp, clean smell of chalk. There was a bell on the door. There were bolts of cloth to the ceiling, a long cutting table covered in brown paper, and a pressing machine in the back that hissed like something alive. Mr. Avedian himself was sitting at the end of the table under a hanging lamp, sewing a buttonhole by hand into the front of a jacket in navy chalk-stripe, and he did not get up when I came in. He was very old, small and bald, with half-glasses on a cord and a pincushion strapped to his wrist like a watch.
"One minute," he said, not looking up. His needle went in and out. "Buttonhole is like a sentence. You don't stop in the middle."
I waited. He finished the buttonhole, and bit the thread, and turned the jacket over and smoothed it, and then he took off his glasses and looked at me.
"You're not a customer," he said. "Customers come with their husband."
"I'm a customer," I said. "It's for my father."