The Red Suit
A Story About What Fathers Leave Behind, and the Lengths They Go to Leave It Right
My father was a quiet man who said more than people thought he did.
Not in words — words were never his primary medium. He was a civil engineer by training and a
problem-solver by disposition, and he approached communication the way he approached bridge design: what is the minimum necessary structure to carry the maximum necessary weight? He did not make speeches. He did not write long letters. He did not, as far as I knew, ever say I love you in the
direct, unambiguous way that certain relationship books insist people need to hear.
What he did was show up.
He showed up to every school play I was in, including the ones where I was background scenery and had
no lines. He showed up to Eric’s baseball games in the rain, in years when Eric’s team lost more than they won. He showed up, after our mother left when I was eleven and Eric was eight, without anyone asking him to or telling him he had to, and he rearranged his entire professional life around the simple fact that
his children needed a present parent and he was going to be that.
He showed up.
For thirty-two years of my life, that was the defining fact about my father.
He was there.
And then he was not.
The pancreatic cancer was diagnosed in March and by September it had done what pancreatic cancer does, which is move faster than anyone is ready for, and we had six months of showing up in reverse — of being there for him the way he had always been there for us, driving him to treatment and sitting with
him through the hard nights and learning, in those months, what it actually looks like when someone runs out of time.
My father died on a Tuesday morning in October.
He was sixty-eight years old.
He left behind a house that smelled like his coffee and his particular brand of aftershave, two children
who were more shaped by him than we had understood while he was alive, and, as it turned out, a secret.
The secret was wearing a bright red suit at his funeral.
I need to tell you about Eric.
Eric is four years younger than me and forty percent more likely to do the wrong thing for the right reason. He is the kind of brother who shows up late to everything but shows up, who says the thing
you’re not supposed to say because he has never learned to calculate social cost before speaking, who drives four hours in a snowstorm because you mentioned on the phone that you’re having a rough week.
He is also the kind of brother who did not learn, for most of our adult lives, how to be in the same room as our father without both of them ending up angry.
I am not going to tell you that my father and Eric had a difficult relationship and leave it there as though it were an immovable fact, because the truth is more complicated and more interesting than that. They
were the same person. That was the problem. Two men with the same stubbornness and the same standard of what constituted acceptable behavior and the same conviction that they were right,
occupying the same family for thirty-something years.
They had the same laugh.
They had the same pattern of going quiet when they were hurt rather than saying so, which meant they spent a lot of years going quiet at each other without ever quite resolving what the quiet was about.
After Eric’s divorce five years ago — a painful one, the kind that required everyone in the family to take
positions they didn’t want to take — he and my father had a falling-out of the kind that has a specific cause that both people can identify but that is really about the accumulation of twenty years of smaller
failures of communication. They spoke at Christmas and birthdays. They were polite. They were not close.
I know my father grieved this.
He did not say so in words. But I watched him for six months of illness and I saw the way he looked when Eric’s name came up, and I saw the phone calls he made that were shorter than he would have wanted
them to be, and I saw him one evening sitting at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper in front of him, writing something in his careful engineer’s print, stopping, starting again.
I did not ask what he was writing.
I have thought about that a great deal since the day of the funeral.
The morning of my father’s funeral was cold and clear.
October in our part of the state has a particular quality — the light comes in sideways in a way that makes everything look more significant than it would in July, and the air has the specific smell of things
ending and things beginning simultaneously, and you feel slightly more alive in it than you do in gentler weather, which is either a gift or an irony depending on why you’re outside.
I had driven to the funeral home early.
I was there when they opened the doors, in the black dress I had bought specifically for this occasion and the shoes my father had given me for my birthday two years ago, which felt right, wearing something he had given me to the day we said goodbye to him.
Eric arrived late.
Not dramatically late, not missed-the-beginning late, but late enough that people had found their seats and the room had settled into its particular quiet and then the door opened and Eric walked in.
And every person in the room, in the peripheral way that people do, registered his entrance.
Because he was wearing red.
Not burgundy. Not wine. Not the deep, forgivable red that could be mistaken for dark in bad lighting. Red. Bright, confident, unambiguous red, a suit that fit him well and that he carried with the exhausted dignity of a man who had made a decision he was standing behind.
I watched him walk to the front of the chapel.
I watched him stand in front of our father’s casket and look down at it with an expression I could not read from where I was sitting.
Then he came and sat beside me.
I leaned in.
What the hell are you wearing?
He kept his eyes forward.
Not now, Sarah.
Dad would have hated this.
He turned to look at me then, and what was in his expression stopped me — not anger, not defensiveness. Something tired and certain and private.
No, he said quietly. He wouldn’t.
And then the service began.
I did not speak to Eric during the service.
I processed what he had said and what he had not said, and I sat beside him through two eulogies and a hymn and the minister’s words, and I watched my brother’s profile while the minister spoke about our father’s character — his reliability, his steadiness, his particular way of making people feel accounted for — and I watched Eric’s jaw work in the way our father’s jaw had worked when he was holding something carefully.
They were the same person.
I had forgotten that, in the years of their distance.
After the service, at the cemetery, was where everything changed.
Mr. Lawson found us at the graveside.
Herbert Lawson had handled my father’s legal affairs since before Eric was born. He was seventy-three, precise in his movements in the way of men who have spent decades in a profession that rewards precision, and he had at the funeral home worn the careful expression of someone managing a great deal of information behind a composed face.
He was walking toward us when he saw Eric.
He stopped.
His eyes went to the red jacket.
And his face did something I had not expected.
He went pale.
Where did you get that suit?
Eric looked at him, surprised by the question.
Why?
Just answer me.
A pause.
It was in Dad’s closet.
Mr. Lawson absorbed this.
I said: Which closet?
Because I had cleaned out my father’s clothes. Not everything, not immediately — there was still work to do — but I had been through his main closet and the one in the spare bedroom, and there had been no red suit.
The one downstairs, Eric said.
I stared at him.
My father’s study was downstairs. It was a room full of bookshelves and an old drafting table he had kept for sentimental reasons and the accumulated record of his professional life in folders and framed photographs. It did not have a closet.
Eric explained.
He had gone to the study looking for our father’s military papers, which he needed for the funeral arrangements, and he had been running his hand along the bookshelves looking for specific folders when he found a narrow door hidden behind a section of the shelving unit. The bookcase, it turned out, was not fixed to the wall. It swung out on hinges that had been installed carefully, decades ago, by someone who knew what they were doing with wood and metal.
Behind the bookcase was a closet approximately four feet wide.
Inside were three suits hanging in garment bags. Two black. One red.
A note pinned to the red one had Eric’s name on it.
I looked at Eric.
He looked at me.
Mr. Lawson said, very quietly: Did you check the pockets?
Eric shook his head.
The attorney pulled us away from the other mourners — my aunt, my father’s colleagues, the neighbors who had come because my father had been a person people came to say goodbye to — and he turned Eric’s jacket inside out with the particular urgency of a man who has been told something is there and needs to find it.
The inside pockets were empty.
Then his fingers stopped near the chest.
He pressed the lining.
Something crackled beneath the fabric.
Eric and I looked at each other.
Mr. Lawson looked at the lining with the expression of a man who has just confirmed something he was told to look for but had not entirely believed he would find.
He whispered: Your father told me I’d know when it was time.
He reached into his briefcase.
He produced a tiny pair of scissors.
I said: Time for what?
He cut the stitches.
Not quickly — carefully, with the focus of a man who understood that what was inside was not to be damaged by the retrieval. The lining had been hand-stitched along a seam that didn’t match the original garment construction. Someone had opened the lining, placed something inside, and closed it again with stitches tight enough to hold but different from the original in a way that Mr. Lawson’s fingers had immediately recognized.
Inside the lining was a folded piece of paper.
Not thin paper. The kind with weight to it, the kind my father used for important correspondence in a world that had mostly moved to email but that he had never entirely trusted for things that mattered.
Mr. Lawson held it out to Eric.
Eric took it.
His hands were not steady.
He unfolded it.
I watched his face as he read.
I had grown up watching my brother’s face cycle through its range of expressions and I thought I knew all of them — the laugh that came from the same place as our father’s laugh, the particular shuttered look when he was hurt, the defiant set of his chin when he was being stubborn about something. I had not seen the expression he wore while reading that letter.
I cannot name it precisely.
Only that it was the face of someone receiving something they had given up believing was still possible.
He let me read it after.
I want to tell you what it said.
Not all of it — some of it was between my father and Eric and is not mine to give you. But the shape of it. The architecture of what a quiet man said when he finally found his words.
My father had written it in the last weeks of his illness, when he was mostly at home and mostly tired and occasionally very clear in the way that dying people become clear when they have accepted the timeline and stopped spending energy on things that don’t matter.
He wrote about the divorce.
He wrote about the years after, and about the falling-out, and about the specific mistake he had made — not the one Eric had accused him of, which was the stated cause of the argument, but the one underneath it, the one my father had understood only after enough time had passed for the anger to thin and reveal the structure beneath.
He had not shown up.
Not in the physical sense — my father was constitutionally incapable of not being physically present at important events. But in the specific way that Eric needed and that my father had failed to provide in the years of Eric’s divorce. He had been there at the events and he had been quiet in his own hurt on Eric’s behalf in the way he was quiet about everything, and Eric had needed him to say something — not to fix it, not to tell him what to do, just to say: I see what this is costing you. I know it’s hard. I’m here.
He had not said it.
He had shown up and been quiet and Eric had read the quiet as judgment, which is what happens when two people who are the same kind of private stop being able to interpret each other.
My father wrote: I spent forty years being better at showing up than at speaking. You needed me to speak and I didn’t, and I told myself you knew, but you didn’t, and I am sorry for that. I should have said it when I could say it to your face. I’ve run out of time to do that, so I’m saying it this way, which is what you do when you’ve spent your whole life putting things in the walls for people to find.
That last line.
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