The Prom Dress My Brother Sewed
Then he met Tammy.
Tammy sold houses. She had a billboard out on the four-lane with her face on it, big teeth, hard hair, a blazer the color of a highlighter, and the words TAMMY WILL MOVE YOU across the bottom. She came to our church one Sunday in heels that sank into the grass at the covered-dish after, and she fixed on my daddy like he was a listing that had been on the market too long, and eight months later they were married at the courthouse in Hartsboro with me and Wyatt standing in the hall outside because, as Tammy put it, “it’s just a signing, honey, not a whole production.”
Tammy had a daughter my age named Kayla. They moved into our house on the county road, and Tammy looked around at it the way she looked around at everything, like she was pricing it to sell. She had opinions about the cabinets and the carpet and the way we kept the yard. She had opinions about me.
I was not what Tammy wanted in a stepdaughter. I was tall and quiet and I wore my mother’s flannels and I would rather be out back with Wyatt than in the bathroom with a curling iron. Kayla was Tammy made over again, pretty and sharp and good at the thing Tammy was good at, which was making you feel small while smiling the whole time.
Here is the thing about Tammy that I want you to understand, because it is the center of this whole story. Tammy was never loud. People think cruelty is yelling. In my experience the real kind is quiet. It wears lipstick. It passes you the mashed potatoes. Tammy never once raised her voice to me in all the months she lived in my mother’s house. She just found the soft places and pressed.
She pressed on the jeans first.
About a month after the wedding, Tammy decided to “finally deal with” my mother’s closet. I came home from school and there were black garbage bags lined up by the back door, and I knew before I looked. Mama’s flannels. Mama’s church dresses. Mama’s jeans, all of them, the Wranglers and the Levi’s and the soft pale gardening pair with the Psalm card still in the coin pocket. All of it bagged up for the Goodwill box behind the Piggly Wiggly.
“She’d want them to go to someone who needs them,” Tammy said, running her thumbnail along the edge of her phone. She did not look up. “It’s not healthy, a shrine. Your daddy agrees with me.”