Once the service was over, dad’s lawyer, Mr. Lawson, approached us and told Eric, “I see you found the suit.”
Pexels
I was so confused at that point. “What’s with the suit, Mr. Lawson?”
Then Lawson pulled us aside, felt the lining of the red jacket, and pulled out a tiny pair of scissors. He carefully snipped a few stitches, pulling out a heavy, folded letter.
“It had to be the letter dad was writing before he passed away,” I said. “I really want to take a closer look at what he was writing, but I couldn’t force myself to do it,” I said.
Once Eric started reading it, his entire expression changed. His face looked like I’ve never seen it before. Like someone had just returned to him a piece of his soul.
Dad got everything off his chest in the letter. He apologized for ignoring Eric in the years since his divorce, stating that he could not be there emotionally when Eric needed him. They both wore their armor. Dad knew that he was infinitely more effective at expressing his love by doing than saying it, so he created his final machine to get those words out that he did not say in life. Hidden closet, red suit, and letter sewn into the seams of it.
Pexels
Lawson confirmed that dad came to visit him in August and told him that when the moment came, there would be an unmistakable sign. And that red suit was exactly that.
Eventually, Lawson gave us two last non-monetary assets of the estate.
While mine was an old, happy photo of my dad smiling in his army uniform kept behind an old blueprint of a bridge with a letter asking me to cross it one day accompanied by someone I love, Eric’s was a brass key with a card instructing him where to find something in the garage: left cabinet behind the paint cans.
We went back home. Eric unlocked the cabinet and found a big package wrapped in brown paper. It was an oil painting of Eric and me as kids in the backyard, which my dad started painting right after my mom left him. He had been working on it for twenty-five years, trying to capture the correct light. And on its back he wrote: We had always belonged to each other. Never forget that.
