He saw me and lifted his chin and started across the red carpet with the walk he had, a little rolling, from twenty-some years of standing on concrete, and I watched other people look at him. That was the second terrible thing. I watched the woman in the good wool coat glance at him and then glance away the way you do from somebody who has wandered into the wrong event. Then I looked at Malcolm Wendt, who had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence about the Bexley house, and then I looked at Claudette.
Claudette had gone white.
I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The color went out of her face, starting at her mouth, so that the lipstick she wore, a dark, careful rose, suddenly looked painted onto paper. Her gloves were in her left hand, and I saw her fingers close on them. She did not step back. She did not say anything. She stood perfectly still and watched my father cross that lobby the way you might watch someone you thought was dead walk into a room.
At the time, I thought I understood exactly what she was feeling, because I was feeling it too. I thought it was shame.
"Hey, kiddo," Dad said when he got to us. He smelled like cold air and Barbasol and, faintly, like cardboard and diesel. He kissed the side of my head the way he had since I was small enough to lift. "I make it?"
"You made it," I said.
"Mrs. Severance," he said.
"Stanley," Claudette said. Her voice was perfectly level. It was the voice she used for waiters who had brought her the wrong wine.
"And this is Malcolm Wendt," I said, too fast, too brightly. "From the firm. Malcolm, this is my dad. Stanley Hadek."
"Pleasure," Malcolm said, and put out his hand, and Dad shook it, and I watched Malcolm's eyes do a very quick, very polite inventory of the suit, the lapels, the tie with the anchors, the boots. Malcolm was a gentleman. His expression did not change at all. That was the third terrible thing, somehow, the way his expression did not change, the care he took that it would not change, as if he had seen something that required care.