The Reason My Mother Wore That Dress

“Bellamy,” she said. “Aaron Bellamy. And his father was named Gerald Bellamy. And his mother is Corinne. I have known that for two years, Whitney. I have known who these people were since the night you came home glowing and told me his father had passed.”

I felt the floor tilt, the way it had tilted when she walked in the door. “Mom, what are you saying?”

She folded the paper towel in half, and in half again, the way she does with everything, neat, careful, a woman who has spent her life keeping her hands busy so her voice stays steady.

“Fifteen years ago,” she said, “I was working nights at the county hospice. There was a man brought in from the hospital, a heart that had been failing for a long time, and he did not have long. His family was out of the country. Somewhere in Europe, on a trip. There had been a fight before they left, the way there sometimes is, and he had told them to go, and they went, and then he got worse very fast, faster than anyone expected. By the time they understood how bad it was and started trying to get home, it was already the last night.”

She was looking at me but she was seeing something else.

“I was on shift. I was the only one there when it got close. And a man should not die alone, Whitney. You know I believe that. So I stayed. Past my shift. I sat with him. I held his hand. I was wearing this dress, because I had come in on my day off to cover for a girl whose kid was sick, and I hadn’t had time to change into scrubs, so I just put on my apron over my own clothes. I wore this dress the whole night.”

My throat had closed. “Mom.”

“He was afraid,” she said quietly. “At first he was afraid. And then, toward the end, he wasn’t, and he talked. He talked about his wife. He talked about a fight, and about how stupid it was, and how he had told her to go on the trip out of pride and now he was sorry. He asked me, near the end, if I would tell her something for him. If I ever got the chance. He didn’t have a phone that worked and there wasn’t time. So he told me, and I promised him I would remember it, and I have carried it for fifteen years, because I never had any way to find her.”

She looked down at the dress. At the faded flowers.

“His name was Gerald Bellamy. And two years ago my daughter came home and told me she was falling in love with a wonderful young man named Aaron Bellamy, whose father had died when he was a boy, and whose mother’s name was Corinne.”

I could not speak. I could not make a sound.