"And now with your father," the photographer said, because he was a professional, because he could see a man standing by a column who had clearly come with us.
Claudette said nothing.
"Dad," I said, and he came.
He stood on my other side. He was a little shorter than Claudette in her heels. He put his arm around my shoulders and I felt the old wool of his sleeve against my neck, rough, smelling faintly of cedar and of something sharper, mothballs, a closet smell, a smell of being kept. The photographer looked through his lens and then looked up over it, just for half a second, at my father's lapels, and then looked back through again.
"Big smiles," he said.
That was when I saw Malcolm, over by the stairs, talking to another partner I had met once at the summer associate dinner, a woman named Lisbet with a silver bob. They were both looking our way. Lisbet said something. Malcolm said something back, and Lisbet laughed, and put her hand on his forearm, the way you do when someone has said something they should not have and it was funny anyway. I don't know what they said. I will never know what they said. It may have had nothing to do with us at all. It may have been about the Bexley house. But I stood there with my father's arm over my shoulder and the mothball smell of that suit in my nose and the flash going off, and I felt something come up through me that I had been holding down for eight years, for twenty-five years, for my whole life, something hot and mean and frightened, and when the photographer lowered his camera and said, "Great, I think we got it," I stepped out from under my father's arm, and turned to him, and said it.
"Seriously, Dad? Couldn't you afford a better suit?"
I said it with a little laugh in it. I want to be accurate. I made it a joke, the way you make something a joke so that you can say it and not be responsible for it. I said it loud enough that the photographer heard it, and Claudette heard it, and probably Malcolm and Lisbet, over by the stairs, heard it too.
My father looked at me.
He looked at me for what felt like a long time and was probably two seconds, and nothing happened in his face at all. That was the worst of it. He did not look hurt. He did not look angry. He looked at me the way he looked at a load on his forks that had come off the truck badly stacked, measuring, deciding what it would take to move it without it all coming down.