The Prom Dress My Brother Sewed

Prom was the last thing on my mind, honestly. I was not going to go.

The thing you have to know about Calder is that prom here is not just a dance. The big tradition is the send-off, or what the mamas all call the picture party. The afternoon of prom, before anybody goes anywhere, all the families gather at one house with a nice yard, and the kids come out in their dresses and their suits, and everybody takes pictures on the porch steps and under whatever tree is blooming, and the mamas cry and the daddies grill and the little kids run around, and it is, I will be honest, one of the prettiest things we do. Half the town comes. It is a big deal.

Tammy volunteered our house.

I should have seen it. Our yard had Mama’s two big magnolias and the wraparound porch Daddy built, and Tammy wanted the town in that yard looking at her roses and her new porch furniture and her daughter in the dress she had driven all the way to a boutique in Atlanta to buy, a real designer thing, pale gold, eight hundred dollars, Tammy told that price to everyone the way some people tell you about Jesus.

And me? I think at first Tammy assumed I just would not go. Which was fine by her. One less thing. But then one night at supper, in front of Daddy and Kayla, she set down her fork and tipped her head at me and said, in that smooth sweet voice, “Now Laney, you’ll want to figure out a dress if you’re coming to your own party, won’t you. I’m sure we can find something at the Walmart in Hartsboro. Or there’s always the church rummage.” And she smiled, and Kayla smiled down at her plate, and it was done.

She wanted me there in a rummage-sale dress. She wanted the contrast. She wanted the whole town to stand in my mother’s yard and see her golden daughter and see the Pruitt girl in somebody’s castoff, and she wanted everyone to understand, without her ever once raising her voice, that there was Tammy’s family and there was the leftover family, and which one was which.

I know that is what she wanted because of what she did next, and I will get to it.

I told Wyatt I was not going.

We were in the shed. He had the light on and something under a sheet on the table that he slid in front of when I came in, which I did not think much of. I sat on the paint-can shelf and told him I was skipping prom, that I’d rather drive us to the Tastee-Freez and get a chili dog and come home.