So he’d had the red suit made. A real one, tailored, bright as the shirts Eric had wanted as a boy and never been allowed. He’d hidden it in a closet he knew Eric would eventually find, because Eric was the one who cared about Dad’s military history, the one who’d go looking for the papers. And he’d left a note with Eric’s name and a test built into it — a test of whether Eric had grown into himself enough to wear the red.
“If Eric puts on the red one,” Dad had told Mr. Lawson, “he’s made peace with who he is, and he’s ready to hear that I finally did too. If he wears black like everyone else, he’s still hiding, and the letter would only hurt him. So it waits.”
Eric had worn the red. Walked into the funeral of the father who’d spent his life dimming him, in the brightest suit in the building, because somewhere in his forties Eric had finally decided to stop apologizing for his own colors. And that choice — the one I’d been so angry about, the one I’d called disrespectful — was the exact thing Dad had been praying his son would be brave enough to make. Eric wearing red to that funeral wasn’t disrespect. It was the answer to a question our father had died hoping he’d say yes to.
