Fitting Revenge

*This one's a little meaner than my usual fare, but sometimes you need a story where the revenge is petty and the romance is sweaty. Thanks for reading, hope you laughed as much as they did.*

"You're wearing that to a wedding expo?" Wally asked, eyeing my sleeveless shirt. He was holding his coffee in one hand and his lanyard for the expo badge in the other, and he just stopped in the doorway of the hotel room and stared at my arms.

"It shows my tattoos," I said. "Tattoos say tailor. Everyone knows that."

"Nobody knows that. No tattoo on earth says tailor."

"I've got a needle and thread on the forearm. Look." I held my arm out. I do have a needle and thread on the forearm, plus a bottle of ink, a snake, and a name I'd had covered up, but the needle and thread was right there near the wrist and I figured it counted.

Wally took a sip of his coffee and did not look at my arm. He is forty-four, he is patient, and he has learned over our year together that I get an idea and then I drag it around like a dog on a leash. He set the badge on the dresser and sat down on the end of the bed, which is what he does when he is settling in to listen to something dumb.

"Okay," he said. "Tell me the plan again. Slowly."

"Roy Davenport is getting fitted for his tux at eleven in the fitting suite. The Pavilion does all their fittings on site. I know this because the expo map is online and I printed it." I held up the printed map. I'd printed it at work on Thursday on the shop printer, which cost me nothing and which my business partner Marcy noticed and said, and I quote, oh no.

"Okay."

"So I'm a tailor. I'm the tailor from the expo, the booth with the measuring tape logo, booth forty-something. I go in, I do his fitting, I'm professional, I'm great. And while I've got him turned toward the mirror, I swap his jacket for the one I brought, which is two sizes too small. He walks down the aisle in June looking like a sausage and everybody photographs it."

Wally put his coffee down. "You bought a tuxedo."

"I rented a tuxedo. Two sizes smaller than Roy. Forty-five chest. Roy's a fifty, everyone at that gym knew Roy was a fifty, the man lived in a tank top."

"You're still measuring him in your head. Three years later."

"That's not the point."

"That's a very funny point, but go on." He was smiling now, which I took as a good sign, though with Wally a smile can also mean he's filing something away to bring up during an argument in October. He's got that kind of memory.

"So you hold the clipboard," I said. I handed it to him. It was a real clipboard, I'd bought it at the office supply place next to the sandwich shop, and I'd printed a fake order sheet for it. Client: R. Davenport. Alterations: sleeve, break, taper. I even put a little checkmark box next to each thing and checked one of them, because real forms always have one thing already checked.

Wally looked at the clipboard for a while.

"Say something," I said.

"You know this is petty."

"I know."

"Like, hall of fame petty. This is a petty hall of fame situation."

"Yes."

"And we came to the expo so you could do this instead of, say, look at cake samples with me, which was the thing you promised me on the drive."

"We can look at cake after. Cake is after. Cake is the reward."

He laughed. He has a good laugh, it comes out of him sideways, and he laughed into his coffee cup and shook his head and then he clipped the badge to his jacket and stood up. "Fine. I'll hold the clipboard. But I want the record to show I think this will go wrong."

"The record can show whatever it wants."

"It's going to go wrong, Donnie."

"It's a jacket swap, Wally. It's the simplest con in the world. Tailors are the most trusted people at a wedding expo. Nobody questions a tailor. You question a guy selling you a ten thousand dollar cake, you don't question a guy holding a pin."

We took the elevator down. The expo was at the convention center on Fifth, the Grand Pavilion, which sounds like a castle but is a big gray building with a parking garage attached. There were banners hanging from the ceiling, white and gold, and a fountain in the lobby with pennies in it. There is always a fountain with pennies in it. I put a penny in because it felt rude not to, and Wally said nothing, which I appreciated.

The floor itself was huge. Rows and rows of booths. Dresses on headless mannequins. A cake company with a cake shaped like a stack of books. A DJ booth where a guy was playing an EDM remix of a song from the seventies to an audience of nobody. Two women were handing out little cups of champagne at the door and I took one and Wally didn't, because Wally doesn't drink before noon, one of his many qualities.

"Clipboard," I said, and he handed it to me, then took it back when I pointed at him. "You. Clipboard. You're my assistant."

"I'm your assistant."

"Just say mm-hm if anyone asks anything. Assistants say mm-hm."

"Mm-hm," he said.

The fitting suite was behind the dress booths, off a hallway with velvet curtains across the entry. There was a sign, PRIVATE FITTINGS, and a folding table with a sign-in sheet that nobody was watching. The suite inside had three fitting areas divided by more curtains, floor-length mirrors, a carpet the color of oatmeal, and a rack of garments along one wall. It smelled like fabric and that starch they spray on everything.

I had loosened a lapel on Roy's rental jacket the week before, when I picked it up from the rental place under a fake name for a fake event, an anniversary party for my cousin. The jacket I rented for the actual swap was the small one. The lapel thing was my insurance, my opening. A loose lapel is a problem a tailor notices and a client doesn't.

Eleven came and went. At eleven twenty the curtains moved and Roy Davenport walked in.

He's forty-six now. He looked maybe forty-five, which felt like an insult to me personally. Gray at the temples, same jaw, same walk, like the floor should be grateful. Behind him was a young guy in a caterer's vest, Dexter, the fiancé, twenty-seven, clipboard of his own, looking around the suite as if checking it for fire exits.

"Can I help you," Roy said to me, not as a question.

"I'm the expo tailor," I said, and I held up the clipboard, except I handed it to Wally, who took it like it was radioactive. "The fitting room at booth forty-seven is being repainted, some issue with the paint. They moved all the tux fittings back here. I've got your order right here."

He squinted at me. I'd grown a beard since he last saw me, three years ago, and I'd shaved the sides of my head, and I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, which is not a disguise, but Roy is the kind of man who does not look at service people. I counted on that. Roy once argued with a waiter about a wine list while holding the wrong menu.

"R. Davenport," I said, tapping the sheet. "Sleeve, break, taper. Jacket had a lapel issue at the warehouse, I'm told, so I'll want to look at that first."

"There is a lapel issue," Dexter said, stepping in. "He said the left one sat funny. I told the rental company."

"That's the one," I said. "That's exactly the one."

Dexter looked pleased with himself, the way young guys do when they've been right in front of Roy. He was twenty-four when they got together, two months after Roy left me, which is a math problem I've done more times than is healthy.

"Fine," Roy said. He hung his own jacket, the one he came in, on the hook by the mirror. "But I've got the cake tasting at noon."

"Cake," Wally said from behind me, quietly, like the word itself was a warning.

I got Roy up on the little platform in front of the mirror. He put his arms out and I slid the jacket onto him and it was the small jacket, the forty-five, and the seams strained at his shoulders and I could feel him not notice yet, because a tux jacket going on over a dress shirt feels like any tux jacket feels, snug, until you look.

I turned him by the elbow toward the mirror. "Take a look at the shoulder seam there," I said, and while his eyes went to the mirror I thumbed the loose lapel on the small jacket and said, "See, this lapel, it's rolling. That's a press issue. I can fix that."

Roy looked at himself. He did not look at the seams. He looked at his face first, because of course he did, and then he frowned, because the jacket was hugging him like a large man hugging a small man, and his arms could barely come down.

"This doesn't fit," he said.

"It'll fit," I said, pinning at the shoulder, my heart doing fine, thank you, totally calm. "I just need to take it in at the back and let out the sleeve, I'll have it done in twenty minutes, you're my first appointment of the day."

"Twenty minutes," Dexter said. "Cake's at noon."

"Eighteen minutes," I said.

And that is when Roy turned toward the mirror, all the way, and caught my eyes in it.

He kept looking. I kept pinning. The pin in my fingers was very loud, or maybe that was the vents.

"You look familiar," Roy said.

"Everybody says that," I said. "I've got one of those faces."

"You were at Ridgefield Gym," he said. "Bench press, by the windows."

"Never been," I said, and Wally, behind me, holding my clipboard, made a small noise, like he'd swallowed his mm-hm wrong.

Roy took a step toward me and then he stopped, because my hands were on his sleeve, and he looked down at them. At the knuckles. I have LOVE and HATE tattooed on them, which was funny when I was twenty-two and less funny when the man who left you three years ago reads them up close. His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist.

"Donald," he said.

"It's Donnie," I said.

"You changed your hair."

"You haven't changed at all."

Wally said, "Okay," in the tone of a man watching a fire start in a trash can and deciding it might put itself out. It did not put itself out.

Roy yanked my wrist and I pulled back and his elbow caught the rolling stool and it shot across the carpet and hit the garment rack and three hangers came down on his head, a hanger actually going through the sleeve of the small jacket, and Roy shouted, "This is assault," which is what Roy says instead of swearing, he said it the whole two years we