I stood in that warm little shop with the pressing machine hissing in the back and the white cotton rectangle in my palm, about the size of my palm, with the outline of a hand on it that had been, I understood slowly, as the shop went very quiet around me, mine. My hand. When I was fifteen months old.
"I don't want to make a new suit," I said.
"No," said Mr. Avedian. "I didn't think you would." He took the cloth from me, gently, and laid it on the cutting table, and smoothed it flat with his thumb. "I'll put this back. Exactly how she had it. Come back Tuesday."
"Can I take a picture of it first?"
"Take a picture," he said. "Then go find out what happened to that man in March of 2001."
I told him I couldn't have known anything about March of 2001. I was a baby. He looked at me with his old wet eyes over the half-glasses for a moment, and then went back to his buttonhole.
"Yes," he said. "So now you are not a baby. Now you go and look."
The last line, it turned out, meant don't sell. I typed the letters into my phone in the parking lot outside the bubble tea place with my thumbs shaking, one by one, hunting for the Cyrillic keyboard, and the translation came up in a gray box. Do not sell it. Don't sell. A command. Something you'd say to a person who might be tempted.
I could have called my father. I sat in the car with the engine running and his name up on my screen and my thumb over it for a long time. It was four-thirty on a Sunday. He'd be on his last break. And I didn't call, and I have thought a great deal since then about why I didn't, and the most honest answer I have is that I did not want him to tell me. I wanted to find it myself. I wanted to read it in a file, in black and white, in the cold language of the court that I had just sworn an oath to, because I did not trust myself to hear it from him without turning it into something smaller, and because some part of me, the part that had stepped out from under his arm in front of the photographer, did not want to give him the chance to be generous about it.
The Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, Division of Domestic Relations and Juvenile Branch, keeps its old closed files in a records center out past the airport, in a low tan building with no windows. Anything from 2001 had been put on microfilm years ago, and the paper had been destroyed, except for transcripts, which were sometimes kept in their bound form because nobody had gotten around to filming them. A custody file is not a public file, but I was not the public. The case number on the white cotton rectangle was a custody case. The child in it, whoever she was, was me. I was a party in interest, and I was twenty-five years old, and I had a bar number six days old and a clerk's badge on a lanyard that still worked on the side doors.