The Prom Dress My Brother Sewed

I looked at my daddy. He was in the recliner. He did not look back. That was the worst part, worse than the bags, that he would not look at me.

I grabbed one bag and ran it out to the shed before she could stop me, and I stood out there in the dark with my mother’s clothes against my chest and I shook. I could not save all of it. By the time I came back in for the second trip the others were already in Tammy’s trunk and gone. But I had one bag. One black garbage bag of my mother’s jeans. I stuffed it up on the high shelf in the shed behind the paint cans and I did not tell anybody, and I honestly half forgot it was up there. That shed was Wyatt’s place more than mine.

I did not know, then, what Wyatt was going to do with it. I don’t think he knew yet either.

You have to understand about Wyatt and that sewing machine. It was Mama’s, an old green Kenmore in a cabinet, and she used to sit at it in the front room and hem Daddy’s work pants and patch the knees of Wyatt’s jeans and make us Halloween costumes out of nothing, a scarecrow, a soldier, a ghost that was just a sheet but she sewed a real face on it. When she got too sick to sit up long, Wyatt would carry the little TV tray over and sit by her and she taught him. Backstitch, she’d say. Lock your thread. Measure it twice, cut it once, same as a board. She was teaching her ten-year-old son to sew because she knew she was not going to be there to do it for him, and none of us said that out loud, and all of us knew it.

After she died he more or less lived at that machine. The FCS teacher at the middle school, Mrs. Dupree, caught him reading a book about pattern drafting in the library during lunch, a twelve-year-old boy, and instead of saying anything smart she just quietly started letting him come to her room after school and use the good machines, the ones that did the fancy stitches. Mrs. Dupree had lost her own husband a few years back. I think she understood something about a person who needed a place to put their hands.

So that was the shape of our life the spring of my senior year. Daddy in the recliner. Tammy and Kayla running the house like a model home. Me counting the days till graduation when I could go to the technical college in Hartsboro and get out. And Wyatt, twelve years old, out in the shed every evening until it got full dark, the little light on, the machine going, and me thinking he was making potholders or pillow covers, the small things he sold at the fall festival for gas money.