My father bragged about it at dinner, tearing his bread and scattering crumbs.
“You sold three,” my uncle barked at him, holding up three fingers. “Three. There are—how many?—ninety-seven left. It’s not like you’ve invented the hat.”
It was early summer when my father was again late for dinner, not as late as the night he screen-printed the first batch of shirts, but late nonetheless and again smug and secretive. We knew it had something to do with the t-shirts. He was never like this over proper clothes. He took pride in them, in the cut of the cloth, in the clinical consistency of the stitching. He could make fat men thin and short men tall by judging the nap and the stripe and the waisting just so. But the white t-shirts brought out a schoolboy giddiness in him. Nobody asked. We’d all find out the next day.
In the morning there was another rail of tees, these with ‘$14.99’ printed on the front. The style of the numbering, hand drawn yet mechanistically boxy and block-like, was the same. They stood one side of the door whilst the remains of the ‘$4.99’ shirts stood on the other.
“They’re the same t-shirts?” I asked my father.
“Two rails outside the shop?” my mother asked. She had wanted to see what it was that he’d been hiding. “It doesn’t look like a tailor’s anymore. We’ll lose trade. People will look at our shop and think that we don’t do fine tailoring anymore. Just rails of overpriced t-shirts.”
Faivish looked from one rail to the other and back again. “So how much are they now?” he asked.
I shook my head wearily. “Zombie.”
My father spent all that day in the shop. He did not do so much as sew on a button. He sat in a chair in the corner and watched the t-shirts through the window. Whenever anybody dwelt outside, he would follow them with his eyes to gauge their reaction. Everything else would be ignored. I had to point out to him that an overweight middle-aged proprietor staring through a shop window at potential customers tends to put buyers off. He harrumphed but knew I was right. Instead he picked up a copy of the Daily News and watched them over the top of the paper. It looked even worse.