I sat at the kitchen table when he got home and asked him about the dry cleaner. He stopped taking off his coat. I asked why he needed the pockets stitched shut when he brought his suits in himself. He said it was “just a preference” and reached for the mail. I told him the woman said he’d been doing it since 2019. That was when he finally looked at me. He sat down slowly and asked what else she’d told me. I said nothing. He stared at the table for almost a minute before saying, “Because if I leave them open, I bring things home that I don’t want you finding.”
I asked what things. He said receipts at first, then envelopes, then small pieces of paper. I asked why he couldn’t simply throw them away. He said because they weren’t his. That answer made everything worse. He went upstairs and came back with a suit he’d worn the previous week. The pockets were still sewn shut. He cut one open in front of me with a pair of scissors and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was a name, an address, and a date from three months earlier. I recognized the street immediately. It was the street where my younger sister had lived before she died. I asked him why he had her address. He said, “Because she asked me to keep going there after she was gone, and I promised I wouldn’t tell you until I knew what she’d left behind.”
Then he told me he’d been going there once a month for seven years. My sister had given him a key shortly before she died and asked him to collect something from the apartment that she was too afraid to leave in her own name. He said he’d found a box, but he’d never opened it because the note on top said it was for me. I asked why he had kept it from me for seven years. He reached into the pocket he’d just opened and pulled out another envelope. My name was written across the front in my sister’s handwriting. He put it on the table and said, “She told me not to give you this unless you ever asked why I was having my pockets sewn shut.”
