"I didn't know she put anything in there," he said.
"You didn't know?"
"She did it while I was at work. I brought it down for her to take in, the week before the trial, and she kept it three days, and when she gave it back she made me put it on in her front room and stood there with her pins in her mouth looking at me, and she said, okay, now you are a father, now you can go to court. That's all she said." He opened his eyes. "And the day after the trial, she came down with a casserole and stood in my kitchen, right there, and said, you don't sell this suit, Stanley. No matter what. Not if you are starving. You promise me. And I said all right, Halyna, I promise, mostly so she'd quit. She made me say it twice." He was quiet. "I didn't know why she cared so much. I thought it was the button. Her husband's button."
"It says don't sell it," I said. "In Ukrainian. On the inside. And my name. And the case number. And she traced my hand."
He put his own hand over his mouth and kept it there for a while.
"She'd have done that from the time I brought you in to the urgent care," he said through his fingers. "She'd sit with you and do that. Trace your hand. On paper bags, mostly. She had a whole drawer. I threw them out when she passed. Her son came from Cleveland to clean out her place and I helped him and there was a whole drawer of paper bags with your hand on them and I—" He stopped. "I threw them out. I didn't know what you do with that."
We sat. The refrigerator hummed. Down the block, the new Pretzel barked once at something and stopped.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?" I said.
"Tell you what? That your grandmother tried to take you?" He shook his head. "You were a baby. Then you were a kid. You don't put that on a kid. And then you were eighteen and that letter came, and you were standing right there with it, and your face." He looked at the place by the table where I'd stood. "I'd been waiting for that letter for seventeen years. I thought it'd come a lot sooner. I'd made up my mind a long time back that when it did, I wasn't going to put my thumb on it. If I told you, you'd have had to pick. Me or her. And I didn't want you to have to pick. I wanted you to have somebody who could get you into the places I couldn't get you into. And she did, didn't she. She got you in."