"I was horrible to him."
"You were honest with him. There's a difference." She put a piece of asparagus into her mouth and chewed it and swallowed. "Although perhaps not in front of the photographer."
"I didn't know you'd hired a photographer."
"It was meant to be a surprise. I'll have him send the proofs. We can choose the ones where—" She stopped. She put down her knife. It was the first time in eight years I had seen Claudette Severance stop in the middle of a sentence because she did not know how it ended. She looked down the long table toward the empty chairs, toward the sideboard with its row of silver candlesticks, and she said, in a different voice, an older voice, "Did he say anything to you? About the suit?"
"What? No. What would he say?"
"Nothing. I only wondered." She picked up her knife again. "Did he say why he wore it?"
"I assume because he didn't own another one," I said, and I heard my own voice come out sharp, sharper than I had ever spoken to her. "I offered to buy him one. In September. I said I'd take him to the place on Easton. He said he had a suit. I thought he meant he'd get something at Kohl's. I didn't think he meant that."
Claudette was quiet. Then she said, "No. I don't suppose you did."
I want to tell you about my father now, before I tell you the rest, because otherwise you will think he is a saint, and he is not a saint, and I think he would be insulted to be made into one.
Stanley Hadek was twenty years old when I was born and twenty-one when my mother left, and he raised me alone in the bottom half of a gray duplex on Weber Road with a chain-link fence and a concrete stoop and the next-door neighbor's dog, a fat beagle named Pretzel, who barked at the mail truck every day at one-fifteen for twelve years. He worked. That is the first and largest thing I know about my father. He worked at the distribution center off Alum Creek Drive, first on the docks, unloading trailers by hand, and then on a reach truck, the tall narrow forklifts that lift pallets up to the top of the racks forty feet in the air, and he worked second shift for most of my childhood and doubles whenever they would give him doubles. He left the house at two in the afternoon and came home at eleven-thirty at night, and for years I was raised in the afternoons and evenings by a rotating crew of neighbors and sitters and, for a long stretch, by an old woman upstairs in the other half of the duplex named Mrs. Petrenko, who was Ukrainian and smelled of camphor and onions and taught me to say thank you and good night in a language I have since entirely forgotten. She died when I was seven. I remember her hands, enormous for such a small woman, and always cool, and a black iron sewing machine with gold lettering in her front room, and sitting under its table watching her feet work the treadle.