He looked at me over his glasses.
"Nobody does this anymore," he said. "Men tailors who could do this, they're dead, or they're me. This is old-country work. This is a woman who learned from her mother in a village where you didn't throw away a coat, you turned it inside out and wore it another twenty years. This is a woman with a treadle machine and a good iron and nothing to do in the evenings. The buttons." He touched the front of the double-breasted jacket, the six buttons, and I saw for the first time that one of them, the lower left, was different from the others, a brown horn button instead of a black plastic one, slightly bigger. "She lost one, she put one from her own tin. Probably from her husband's coat. That's horn. That's real."
I thought of Mrs. Petrenko under the hanging lamp in the upstairs front room, with her enormous cool hands and her black iron sewing machine with the gold letters, and her feet working the treadle, and me sitting under the table watching.
"I think I know who," I said.
"Mm." He was not listening anymore. He had opened the jacket out flat and was feeling along the inside of the lining on the left side, below the inside breast pocket, with the flat of his fingers, the way a doctor feels for something under the skin. He stopped. He felt again.
"There is something here," he said.
"What?"
He didn't answer. He took a seam ripper from the pincushion on his wrist, a little steel thing with a red bead on the end, and then he stopped and looked up at me.
"It's your father's suit," he said. "I don't open somebody's suit without permission. You want, I open the lining here, two inches, I close it again so nobody knows. You don't want, we leave it."
I should have said no. I know that. It was his suit. It was his closet I had taken it out of without asking, and his life. But I was a lawyer by then, for six days, and I had spent three years learning that the answer is almost always in the document nobody has read, and I said, "Open it."