hard time either way. His mom had wanted him to try it on before graduation, only then Jordan and Micah had thought it would be hilarious if they all went naked under their graduation robes. And you know what? It had been hilarious. Jordan and Micah had been correct.
None of which changed the fact that there was no way he could wear this fucking getup to Meg’s dad’s wedding.
He was sitting on the side of his bed trying to figure out how much a new one would cost when his mom knocked on his bedroom door, easing it open before waiting for Colby to tell her to come in—one of his least favorite habits of hers, and another reason he wanted to move out as quickly as humanly possible. “I’m headed out,” she announced, then looked at him with great alarm. “Colby,” she said, like she was possibly concerned he hadn’t noticed, “that suit does not fit you.”
Colby flopped backward onto the mattress. “I know that,” he said to the ceiling. “Thanks.” Still, when he sat up again, something about the way she was gazing at him had him confessing: “I’m invited to a wedding.”
He watched half a dozen questions flicker across her lined, serious face—where? Who with? Do you have a girlfriend I don’t know about?—and if she’d asked any of them he probably would have shut down entirely, but in the end all she said was “Follow me.”
Colby got up and trailed her down the narrow hallway into the room she’d shared with his dad, his bare feet sinking into the carpet. He didn’t come in here a lot lately, but mostly it looked the same as it always had: the pink flowered wallpaper border along the ceiling, the heavy oak furniture they’d inherited from Grandma Moran. Photos of him and his brother as babies sat in silver frames on top of doilies on the dresser, along with a picture of his parents smushing cake into each other’s faces at their own wedding. Colby glanced away from that one, jamming his hands into his pockets.
Glanced back.
His mom dropped her purse on the neatly made bed, then opened the closet that had been his dad’s. “There’s a couple of them in here,” she explained, rummaging through the hangers. “They probably aren’t hip or anything, but they should get the job done.”
Colby nodded wordlessly. With the closet door open, the whole room smelled like his dad all of a sudden: bar soap and orange Tic Tacs and overstock cologne from Odd Lot, so strong that Colby felt a lump form immediately in his throat. In the year since his dad had died, the rest of the house had shifted to accommodate his absence, his slippers disappearing from the mudroom and his favorite mug migrating to the back of the cupboard and their subscription to Newsweek lapsing, like scar tissue thickening over an open wound. In here, though, it was like he was still alive. Just for a second, Colby would have sworn he was going to walk in any minute to change his clothes after work, to put on his Indians hoodie and get himself a Coors Light from the fridge. Colby didn’t know what had happened to that Indians hoodie, actually; suddenly, he was seized with a physical urge to rip through every drawer in the house until he found it.
“Here,” his mom said, the sound of her voice startling in the quiet room. When Colby turned to look at her, she was holding out a sober-looking gray suit. “Try this one.”
“Um.” Colby cleared his throat, blinked twice. “Sure.”
His mom turned her back to give him privacy while he changed into it, then turned around and looked at him skeptically. “I’d need to hem the pants,” she decided, reaching out to pluck at the waistband. “Maybe take it in a little, too, but that’s not hard. When do you need it?”
“This weekend,” he admitted with a grimace. “Saturday night.”
His mom nodded, those same unasked questions written all over her face. “You look like him, you know that?”
That surprised him; people always said that Matt looked like their father, but never Colby. “I do?”
“You do,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pulling her purse into her lap like a cat she was thinking of petting. “You remind me of him, too. Not in a sad way; I don’t want you to think that. But sometimes when you’re fixing something around the house or I see