The Prom Dress My Brother Sewed
My Little Brother Sewed My Prom Dress From Our Dead Mother’s Jeans And My Stepmother Made Sure The Whole Town Saw
I was seventeen the spring my brother Wyatt turned our dead mother into a dress, and I did not know he was doing it until the morning of prom, when he carried it out of the shed with both arms like he was carrying her.
Let me back up, because you cannot understand the dress without first understanding the quiet in our house, and you cannot understand the quiet without first understanding my mother.
Her name was Carol Ann Pruitt. We lived outside a town called Calder, Georgia, on a stretch of county road where the mailboxes sat on old milk cans and the kudzu came up to the fence line by June. Mama grew up on that road and never wanted to leave it. She wore jeans most every day of her life. Not nice jeans. Work jeans, Wranglers and old high-waisted Levi’s that she washed so many times they went soft and pale at the knees, with the hems let down and the cuffs rolled and the back pockets worn into the shape of whatever she carried, a church bulletin folded in quarters, a packet of okra seed, a little laminated card with the twenty-third Psalm on it that she kept in the coin pocket of her gardening pair.
She died when I was fifteen. Ovarian cancer, caught late, the way it usually is out here where the nearest real hospital is an hour and ten minutes down the four-lane and people put off going because the truck payment is due. She was sick for a year and gone in a season. I remember the smell of the church fellowship hall after, ham and funeral potatoes and lilies, and I remember my little brother Wyatt standing by the casket in a clip-on tie, twelve years old now but only ten then, not crying, just looking at her hands folded on the denim quilt the ladies’ circle had made.
He did not cry at the funeral. I want you to hold onto that, because people in Calder talked about it. They said that Pruitt boy is cold, did you see, not a tear. They did not know Wyatt. Wyatt did not cry where people could watch him. Wyatt went home and took it apart in his hands, the way he took apart everything that hurt him, the busted weed-eater, the radio, the hearts of the people he loved.
Our daddy’s name is Ronnie. He is not a bad man. I need to say that plain before I say the rest, because the rest is hard on him. Ronnie Pruitt is a good man who went underwater when his wife died and never fully came back up for air. He worked HVAC, long hot days in other people’s attics, and he came home gray and quiet and sat in the recliner with the TV on and did not watch it. For about a year it was just the three of us and the quiet, me doing the cooking I half knew how to do, Wyatt out in the shed with Mama’s old sewing machine, Daddy in the recliner. We were sad but we were ours.