The Uniform My Father Tried To Destroy

We got married twenty minutes later than scheduled, which the officiant said was the least dramatic delay he’d had in a wedding in eleven years at that church. My bride and I danced our first dance at the VFW hall that night, me still in my dress blues because there was nothing else clean to wear and, honestly, because I had earned the right to be married in them. My father asked me, near the end of the night, if I would ever consider selling him the suit story instead of the truth, so his old customers would stop asking. I told him no. I told him the truth was the better story, box cutter and all, because it was the one that actually happened, and because it was the one where he finally told me who he really was.

He still runs the hardware store on the corner of Main and Church Street. I still call him every Sunday. It is not the relationship either of us pictured when I was small enough to sit on his shoulders in that same store, watching him work a cash register that never balanced right. But it is honest now, in a way it was not before that night, and honest is worth more to me than the wool ever was.

I keep one thing from that ruined suit. A single brass button off the jacket cuff, in a small dish on my dresser, next to my medals. Not because it reminds me of what my father took from me the night before my wedding. Because it reminds me of what he could not take, no matter how many cuts he made, no matter how long the silence in that doorway lasted. Some things are stitched into a man deeper than any suit, Bellamy or otherwise, and no blade reaches that far.