But now Michael was bringing home a girl from a family that, from everything he’d described in his careful, vague way, valued wealth above almost everything else.
Jessica’s father, Richard Bradford, ran a private equity firm downtown. Her mother, Patricia, sat on the boards of half the major charities in Boston. Her older brother, Christopher, managed the family’s sprawling real estate portfolio. And they wanted to meet me — Michael’s father, the retired man from South Boston who, according to Michael’s carefully vague descriptions, worked in finance, drove a Honda, and lived modestly on what they probably assumed was a pension.
I pulled the leather jacket off its hanger.
It was time for a test.
Saturday arrived with that particular crisp autumn light that makes Boston feel almost cinematic in October, gold and sharp all at once. I dressed carefully, which is to say I dressed exactly the way I actually lived. My oldest pair of jeans, faded white at the knee where the denim had worn thin. A flannel shirt I’d picked up at Goodwill for six dollars, soft from a hundred washes. The leather jacket, genuinely worn since 1995, the kind of jacket that’s earned every crack in its leather. And my work boots, the same ones I’d had on the day I helped Michael move apartments the year before, still carrying a faint scuff along one toe from a stairwell in Somerville.
