The coat was my father’s. He died in October. By December I was wearing it because mine had given up at the cuffs, and his was hanging in the hall, and the woman from the agency was coming, and I needed to get to the bus.
The coat fit me. This was the first surprise. He was a wider man, I think. But the way he had worn it — sleeves pushed up at the elbows, collar pulled forward to break the wind — had given the coat his shape, and his shape, when he leaned forward against weather, was close enough to mine that I could put it on without thinking and step out into a cold he had known a different way.
I didn’t mean to keep it. I meant to take it to the donation place in spring. Spring came. I hung the coat in the closet by the guest room and forgot about it for a week, then went looking for it because I thought I’d lost a glove in the pocket. I had. I also found a folded napkin from a diner I didn’t recognize, a pen with a drugstore name on the side, and a scrap of paper that said BREAD. CHEESE. CALL R.
That summer I started wearing it on cooler evenings. I told myself this was practical. I could not, on the worst days, say it was practical. The coat was lined with wool and we were having a warm summer.
The coat learned me, slowly, in the places where I was different from him. The collar relaxed at my neck. The pocket I kept my keys in began to sag where his had not. The cuff that had been pushed to his elbow began to hold a fold at mine, slightly higher.
By autumn the coat was almost mine. Almost — there was still the place between the shoulder blades where his back had pressed against the lining for years, a darker patch I could feel through the wool. When I leaned back in a chair I would catch it. I never wore the coat into a chair.
I have kept it past the cold. It is hanging in the hall now, in spring again, two springs past his death, and I have not yet taken it down. There is a glove in the pocket that I think is mine.