Then her eyes went down. To the jacket. To the elbow patches. To the tie, which I'd thought was the best thing I owned.
Then she smiled again, but it was a different smile. It was the smile she uses on the phone with clients. I'd heard it through the wall when she lived with me for six months after grad school, that bright, careful voice, and I'd thought then that it was a good skill to have, and I thought now that I'd never expected to see it pointed at me.
"Dad," she said, and hugged me, and while she was hugging me she said into my ear, very quietly, "Oh, Dad. The corduroy?"
"It's my jacket," I said.
"I know. I know it is." She stepped back and straightened my tie, which didn't need straightening. "I just. I offered. I would've gotten you something. You could have told me."
"Told you what?"
"That you needed something."
"I didn't need anything."
She closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them, she'd decided something. "Okay. It's fine. It's totally fine. They're already seated. Just—Philippa's going to ask a lot of questions. She's like that. Just keep it light, okay? You don't have to get into, like, the details of compressors."
"I wasn't planning on compressors."
"You always end up on compressors."
That was true, and I laughed, and she laughed a little too, and for a second it was all right. Then she took my arm and turned me toward the dining room, and as she did, she glanced over her shoulder at the hostess, a young woman with a tablet, and I saw Margot give her a small, apologetic smile. The kind you give a stranger when your dog jumps on them.
I don't think she knew she did it. I've thought about it a lot since, and I'm almost sure she didn't.
When Margot was eighteen she went away to college on what she thought was a combination of scholarships and loans and whatever her father had scraped together, and she came home at Thanksgiving of her freshman year and went through her closet with a garbage bag. I stood in the doorway of her room and watched her fill it. The hooded sweatshirts. The jeans from Kohl's. A puffy vest her mother had bought her in seventh grade that she'd kept, I always thought, for sentimental reasons. All of it went in the bag.
"Donating," she said, when she saw me.