The Red Suit At Dad’s Funeral

Mr. Collins closed his eyes for a second, like a man bracing for weather. “Did you read what was inside the envelope?”

“It just said to wear it the first time somebody tried to tell our family who we were supposed to be now that he was gone. That’s it. That’s the whole note. I didn’t understand it until about four minutes ago.”

Beverly let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “This is absurd. You expect anyone to believe Frank hid a red suit in the wall for some kind of dramatic reveal? He was a hardware store owner, not a soap opera writer.”

“Did you check the jacket pockets,” Mr. Collins asked Chris, as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

“There’s nothing in the pockets.”

“Not the pockets,” Mr. Collins said. “The lining.”

I watched my brother’s face change as he understood, a half second before the rest of us, that there was more to this than a note and a dare. Mr. Collins asked the funeral director, quietly and with more authority than I had ever heard from him, for a private room, and the two of them walked Chris into the small family lounge off the main chapel while the rest of the mourners filed out toward the parking lot, confused, murmuring, Beverly trailing behind looking like a woman watching her own version of events come apart in real time and unable to stop it.

I followed. Of course I followed.

Inside the little lounge, under fluorescent light that made everyone look twenty years older, Chris took off the jacket and handed it to Mr. Collins, who turned it inside out with the careful, almost reverent movements of a man who had been waiting a long time to do exactly this.

He found the seam almost immediately, a section along the chest lining that had been hand stitched closed with thread that didn’t quite match, small and neat and clearly not factory work. He pressed his fingers against it and something inside crackled, faint but unmistakable, like old cellophane.

“Your father,” Mr. Collins said slowly, “came to my office in August. Three separate times. The first two times he just wanted to talk, about nothing in particular, which I understand now was his way of working up to something. The third time, he brought this jacket with him in a garment bag and asked me to help him sew something into the lining. He told me not to open it, not to explain it to anyone, not even to you, Chris. He said, and I remember this exactly because it struck me as such a strange thing for a man to say about his own funeral, ‘I’ll know when it’s time, Barry, but just in case I don’t, you’ll know. You’ll know by the look on her face.'”