I sent a thumbs-up, because I am fifty-eight years old and that is the extent of my emotional vocabulary on a phone, and I drove to my next call.
That night I stood in front of my closet. It is not a big closet. It is a closet in a two-bedroom bungalow on West 98th Street that my wife Gloria and I bought in 1996 for sixty-one thousand dollars, and it holds what a man like me needs. Work pants, eight pairs, Dickies, the gray kind. Work shirts with my name stitched over the pocket from when I was with Lakeshore Mechanical, plus a few from after, when I went on my own and stopped bothering with the stitching. Two pairs of jeans. A funeral suit, black, that I bought for Gloria's service and wore twice more since, for my brother and for a man I used to work with. I wasn't going to wear the funeral suit to my daughter's engagement dinner.
And there was the corduroy jacket.
It is brown. It has suede patches on the elbows, which I'm told were fashionable at some point and then unfashionable and then fashionable again, though I can't keep track. I bought it at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on Lorain Avenue for nine dollars in 2014, and I liked it because it was warm and the pockets were deep enough for a pair of needle-nose pliers and a tire gauge. I'd worn it to Margot's graduation from the master's program. I'd worn it to her apartment for Thanksgiving. I'd worn it the first time I met Peter, at a brewery, and he had said, "Great jacket," and I had believed him, and I still think he meant it.
In the dresser drawer, in a cigar box, there were three ties. One of them was Gloria's favorite, a dark green knit with a square bottom that she bought me for our tenth anniversary because she said it made me look like a professor who'd been in a bar fight. I took it out and held it for a while.
I want to say this clearly, so nobody gets the wrong idea about who I am: I don't dress the way I do because I can't afford otherwise. I could walk into any store downtown and buy a suit. I don't, partly for reasons I'll get to, and partly because I just don't care. A jacket keeps you warm. A tie, if you have a good one, keeps you company. That has always seemed like enough.
But standing there with that green tie in my hand, I knew it wouldn't be enough for Saturday. Not for Margot. And I knew that I was going to wear it anyway, and I wasn't entirely sure whether that was love or stubbornness, or whether there's ever been much difference in me.
II
Wren & Salt sits on the east bank of the river in what used to be the Lakeside Ice Company's cold storage house, a long brick building with arched windows and a loading dock that they've turned into a terrace with heaters and little white lights. I knew the building before it was a restaurant. I knew it, in fact, better than almost anyone who was going to be eating in it that night, but I'll come to that.
I didn't valet. A young man in a black vest stood under the awning with a podium and a key box, and I watched him take a gray Range Rover from a woman in a camel coat, and I thought about handing him the keys to a 2009 Silverado with a ladder rack and a toolbox bolted in the bed, and I parked in a lot three blocks up and walked.
It was the second week of October and the air off the lake had that clean bite to it. I had the green tie on and the corduroy jacket buttoned and my good boots, the brown ones, polished the night before at the kitchen table with newspaper spread out the way my father used to do it. I'd gotten a haircut at Sal's on Thursday. I'd shaved twice, once in the morning and once at six. I felt, walking up that sidewalk, about as respectable as I know how to feel.
Margot was waiting just inside the door.
She looked beautiful. I want to say that first, because it was the first thing I thought. She was wearing a dress the color of red wine and her hair was pinned up the way her mother used to wear it for weddings, and she had small gold earrings, and for one second, before she saw me, she had her arms crossed and was looking out the window at the river with an expression I recognized from when she was six and waiting at the top of a slide, gathering her nerve.
Then she turned and saw me, and I watched her face do three things very fast.
First it lit up. I'll always be grateful for that. Before anything else, she was glad.