"And then I opened my mouth."
"Yeah," he said. "Then you did." He didn't soften it, and I loved him for not softening it. "That one stung, kiddo. I'm not going to tell you it didn't. Standing there in that thing, and you say that, and her standing right there hearing it. It was like I was back in that room and he was asking me again. Only this time it was you asking."
"I'm sorry," I said. "Dad. I'm so sorry. I was ashamed. Not of you. I mean, of you, but not really of you. Of me. Of where I came from. Of all of it. And I took it out on you in front of everybody because you were the only person in that room I knew wouldn't make me pay for it."
He nodded slowly, as if I had told him something about a load that had come off the truck badly and he was considering how to move it.
"All right," he said.
It was what he used to say, in the door of my room, after he'd yelled. It had always been his apology. I'd never heard it the other way round before, as the thing a person says when he takes one.
We ate the sandwiches at the kitchen table at a quarter to one in the morning with the old Vernors going flat in the glasses, and watched the recorded game on the couch with the sound low, and somewhere in the third quarter he fell asleep sitting up with his chin on his chest, the way he always had, and I sat beside him and did not wake him. Around two I got up and went back down the hall and turned off his bedroom light. The two suits were lying on the bed where we'd left them, the navy one still in its open black bag with the tags on the sleeve, and the old charcoal one, which he had taken down at some point while I wasn't watching and laid next to it, out of its plastic, the six buttons and the wide lapels and the strip of borrowed blue-gray at the end of each sleeve, the brown horn button among the black ones. I stood and looked at them side by side in the light from the hall. I put my hand flat on the left side of the old jacket, below the inside pocket, and felt, very faintly, through the lining and the canvas, the edge of something folded there, about the size of a hand.
I don't know yet what he'll wear to the reception on the thirty-first floor in January. I asked him, in the morning, when he woke up on the couch with a crick in his neck and the television showing a menu screen, and he said, "Haven't decided," and went to make eggs. I don't know yet whether I'll go to Claudette's at Christmas. I asked him that too, and he said, "She's your grandmother. That's yours to decide," and I said, "I know, Dad, I hate that," and he laughed, a real laugh, the first one I'd heard from him since before the Palace, and said, "Yeah. I know you do." I haven't decided whether to tell him what I have been thinking, which is that it would be possible, maybe, someday, if everyone involved could be persuaded to behave, to bring her here, to the table under the auto parts calendar, and put a plate with a blue rim in front of her, and see what she makes of a turkey sandwich at midnight. I suspect the new Pretzel would bark at her.
What I did decide was this. On the Monday after Thanksgiving I went back to Sarkis Avedian's shop on High Street, with the bell on the door and the pressing machine hissing in the back, and I took off my navy jacket, the one with the quarter inch of cuff, and laid it on his cutting table on the brown paper, and asked him if there was room inside the lining for something about the size of a playing card. He looked at me over his half-glasses for a long time. Then he said there was always room, if you knew where to look, and handed me a square of white cotton and a needle and a skein of dark blue thread, and pointed me to a stool under the lamp, and told me that a buttonhole was like a sentence and so was everything else, and that I should not stop in the middle. I have been working on it for a week. I've got the case number done, and the date. I haven't decided yet what goes on the last line.