“The world is changing and your dad is getting left behind,” his father said and ordered a roll with white cheese, which he tore in two. “My friends go around in nice clothes, and here I am in these old rags.” His father looked at him steadily, with bloodshot eyes and a little bit of cheese on his mustache. “Do you see that over there?” he asked, pointing to a sign that said TAILOR. “There, they could make an elegant suit your dad could use to get ahead.”

Without letting go of his empty Pepsi, Argenis asked, “And why don’t they, Papi?” “Because Papi has no money,” José Alfredo responded, stroking his son’s head in short, repetitive motions, like Aladdin with his famous lamp.

They left the colmado and José Alfredo took his hand to cross the street. Now, in the tailor’s doorway, looking at the ground and grimacing, he said, “Your mom gave me money to get your sneakers. What brand was it you wanted? I forget.” With a sense of duty that hardly fit in his body, Argenis purged himself of the need of a pair of brand-name shoes, of his fear of the jokes his friends would continue to make as they pointed at his sneakers, and pulled his trembling father into the tailor’s.

They entered a narrow space at the rear of which a table was stacked to the ceiling with fabric. The memory of the hot, clean smell of that place invaded his room in Havana. It was the steam an iron brings out of the starched cloth of a shirt. Next to the table a doorway led to a workshop. There, two dark-skinned young men, their gazes fixed on sewing machines, were finishing something that looked like a costume. One was decorating the edge of a pair of pants with ribbon, the other was completing a fuchsia vest. Argenis thought of the outfits of the bands of Tony Seval or Aramis Camilo. A short man in gray cashmere pants and a pale-gray shirt bustled about with his back to them, a measuring tape around his neck, an iron in his hand, and a cigarette in his mouth. When he turned around to greet them, smiling, Argenis could make out the glimmer of a gold tooth in place of one of his canines under the very black, triangular mustache.

His father’s suit was already finished. When José Alfredo saw it he let go of Argenis’s hand to try it on, and there, in front of everyone, shed his clothes as fast as someone with only twenty minutes to cheat on their wife. It was a dark-blue two-piece suit. Once it was on, his dad made a James Bond face in the mirror on the wall, not seeing the boy who watched him from a palm-wicker chair in the corner of the reflection.