The Red Suit At Dad’s Funeral

“Beverly,” I started.

She wasn’t finished. She reached out and grabbed the lapel of his jacket, right there in front of at least thirty mourners still filing past, her knuckles white against the red fabric. “Take it off. Right now. I will not have people from the bank, people from the county commission, people who matter, looking at photographs of this funeral with you dressed like a party favor.”

The room had gone very quiet. I remember a woman near the guest book putting a hand over her mouth. I remember our pastor, Reverend Jerry Greer, starting to step forward and then stopping himself, unsure whether this was his place to enter.

Chris did not raise his voice. He never has, not once in his life that I can remember, and it is one of the things I love most about him. He simply looked down at her hand on his jacket until she let go, and said, “Dad asked me to wear this. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with him.”

“Your father is dead,” Beverly said, and something about the flatness of it, the casual cruelty of saying it like a fact rather than a grief, made my stomach turn over in a way I still remember exactly. “He doesn’t get a say anymore. I do.”

That was the moment Barry Collins stepped out of the small crowd gathered near the chapel doors.

I had not even noticed him arrive. He must have come in during the eulogy and stood near the back, the way men of his generation do at funerals, not wanting to take up space. He was looking at Chris, or more precisely, he was looking at the jacket, and his face had gone the particular shade of pale I associate with hospital waiting rooms.

“Chris,” he said. “Where did you get that suit?”

Beverly rolled her eyes. “Barry, honestly, now is not the time for a wardrobe inquiry.”

Mr. Collins ignored her entirely, which I had never once seen him do to anyone in thirty years of family dinners and store visits. “Chris. Answer me. Where.”

My brother’s jaw worked for a second before he answered. “It was in Dad’s study. In the house. Behind the bookshelf.”

I frowned. “There’s no closet behind the bookshelf, Chris. I cleaned out that whole room myself after he went into hospice.”

“There’s a door,” Chris said. “I found it three weeks ago, looking for his discharge paperwork for the VA claim he never finished filing. There’s a narrow door behind the bookcase on the east wall. It’s got a false back on it, like Dad built it himself, which he probably did, because who else would have. Inside there were three garment bags hanging up. Two black suits. This one. There was an envelope pinned to the jacket with my name on it in his handwriting.”