"Dad."
"She did. I'm not stupid, Laney. I know who Malcolm whatever-his-name-is is. I know you don't get that job from Linden-McKinley and a reach-truck driver."
"I got that job," I said, "because I was third in my class."
"I know you did." He almost smiled. "I'm just saying. She held the door."
I looked at the transcript between us. "Then why'd you wear it?" I said. "If you didn't want me to pick. If you didn't want to put your thumb on it. You knew she'd be there. You knew she'd know the suit."
He didn't answer right away. He got up and put the sandwiches on two plates, the same two plates, white with a blue rim, that we had eaten off my entire life, and poured two glasses of Vernors, and set mine in front of me.
"Come here a minute," he said. "Bring your pop."
I followed him down the short hall to his bedroom. He turned on the overhead light, and lifted the closet door on its knob, and slid it open, and reached past the four tan work jackets with his name on them, and past the old suit in its clear bag at the very back, and from behind it, from a hook on the wall at the very back of the closet I had never noticed, he took down a second garment bag. Black plastic, with a store's name printed on it in white. He laid it on the bed on the tan chenille bedspread and unzipped it.
It was a navy suit. Single-breasted, two buttons, notch lapels of an ordinary width. Plain flat-front trousers. The price tag was still on the sleeve, on a plastic loop: $189.99, and a red sticker over that, 40% OFF, and on the trousers a paper strip from the store's alterations counter, with HADEK written on it in ballpoint and a hem length.