"Well." She drew off her gloves one finger at a time. "I've had more practice." She looked over my shoulder at the crowd. "Is your father here?"
"Not yet. He's coming from work. He had a half shift."
Something moved across her face then, very quickly, and was gone. I took it for the usual thing, the little wince she had whenever my father came up, the wince of a woman who had grown up in a world where men did not have half shifts. I had learned to translate the wince for him and to translate his silences for her, and to stand in between so that the two of them almost never had to occupy the same room. They had been in the same room, in my lifetime, so far as I knew, exactly twice: at my high school graduation, where they had sat on opposite ends of a bleacher in the Linden-McKinley gym and not spoken, and at my college graduation, where Dad had left before the reception because of a shift he could have traded and did not. That was all. It was a system. It worked.
Malcolm Wendt found us before I found him. He was a tall man with a long, pleasant face and the casual air of somebody who had never once wondered whether he was dressed correctly for a room. He was the partner I would be working under in the trusts and estates group at Ruhl Benning, starting in January, and the firm sent a partner to every new associate's swearing-in.
"Laney," he said. "Big day." He turned to Claudette, and his whole face changed, warmed, the way faces in that world change when they recognize one of their own. "And you must be Mrs. Severance. We've been on a couple of the same letterheads, I think. The Wexner thing, a few years ago."
"Of course," Claudette said, and gave him her hand, and they were off, exactly as I had planned. I stood a little to the side of them with my program rolled into a tube in my fist and my heart going too fast and I thought, This is it. This is the room I worked for. I am standing in it.
Then I saw my father come in through the brass doors, and I felt my stomach drop the way it does in an elevator.
I knew the suit. That was the first terrible thing. I had seen it before, though I could not have told you when, maybe once or twice as a child at the back of his closet in the duplex on Weber Road, hanging in a dry cleaner's bag gone yellow with age among his work jackets and the one good flannel shirt. I had assumed he had gotten rid of it years ago. He had not gotten rid of it. He was wearing it.
It was charcoal gray, or it had been charcoal gray once. Now it was the color of a sidewalk after rain, and it had that particular shine that old wool gets at the places where a body rubs against it most, at the elbows and across the seat and along the front edges of the lapels. And the lapels. They were enormous. They were the lapels of a man in a 1989 movie about the stock market, wide and peaked and rolling down to a double-breasted front that closed with six buttons, two of which did anything. The shoulder pads stood out past his actual shoulders like the eaves of a house. The trousers had pleats. They were full in the thigh in a way that had not been fashionable in my lifetime, and they ended in cuffs that sat a little high, so that when he walked you could see a flash of his white athletic socks above the black work boots he had polished to a hard shine and was wearing because they were the only black shoes he owned.
He had put on a tie, maroon with a small repeating pattern of gold anchors on it, knotted in a fat, lopsided knot that pulled his collar slightly to the left. His collar was too big for him.