"I'm sorry."
"And you." She stood up. "You let me be embarrassed of you. You stood there in that restaurant and let Philippa talk to you like you were the guy who came to fix her fridge, and you let me do that thing, where I talked over you, and you knew. You knew the whole time that you were the—that you were basically—" She threw up her hands at the garage, the coffee cans, the radio. "And you didn't say anything. You just let it happen."
"What was I supposed to say?"
"Something! Anything! 'Actually, Philippa, I own part of this building.' 'Actually, Margot, I paid for your entire life.'"
"I don't own part of the building. It's two percent of the business. And it's not mine, it's yours."
"Oh my God. Dad. That's not the point." She stared at me. "Can I tell you something? And you're not going to like it?"
"Go ahead."
"I don't think it's humility. I think you like it. I think you like walking into a place in that jacket and having everyone look right through you, because you know something they don't. I think it makes you feel—" She searched for it. "Clean. Like you're the only honest person in the room. And you get to be the one who doesn't want anything, and everybody else gets to be the one who's shallow."
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
Here is the hard thing. She wasn't all wrong. I've turned it over many times since, the way you'd turn over a part to find the crack. There's a pleasure in being underestimated. It's a small, mean pleasure, and I'd never once looked at it straight. I'd told myself the jacket was about Gloria, and about not caring, and some of it was. But some of it, I think, was a man who'd decided a long time ago that if nobody expected anything of him, nobody could find him lacking.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe some of that's true."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she picked up her coffee, which had gone cold, and her keys.
"I need to think," she said. "I'm not—I'm not done being mad. I don't know when I'm going to be done."
"That's all right."
"Can I take the pictures? If there are more? Of Mom, at the old place?"