The Dress My Neighbor Wore Saturday

Vicki opened her front door wearing my dress.

I knew it before she had the door all the way open. Dusty blue lace over a satin slip. Three-quarter sleeves, because I had asked for three-quarter sleeves. A scalloped neckline that Amber had said made me look like somebody’s elegant aunt.

The white tag was still hanging under her left arm, turning a little in the draft from the storm door.

“Lori!” she said. “Well, you caught me. I was just trying something on.”

I stood on her welcome mat with my phone in my hand. On the screen was a photo the delivery driver had taken forty minutes earlier. A flat white box, sitting behind the big planter on my porch, right where the drivers always left things.

I had come home on my lunch break to get it. The planter was there. The box was not.

So I had done what I always did. I had walked straight across the cul-de-sac to ask Vicki if she had seen anybody.

“Are you all right, hon?” she said. “You look peaked.”

Behind her, down the hallway toward the garage door, there were boxes. I do not mean a few. They were stacked waist high along the wall, brown cardboard and gray padded mailers, some slit open, some still taped shut.

She saw me look. She shifted her weight, just a half step, so her shoulder was in the way.

“Gary’s been cleaning out the attic,” she said.

I looked back at the dress. It was a little snug on her across the back. She is a size up from me and always has been.

“Where did you find that?” I asked. My voice came out ordinary. I do not know how.

“This?” She smoothed the lace over her hip and laughed. “Gary bought it for our anniversary. Can you believe it? Thirty-one years and the man finally picks out something with a waist.”

She looked me right in the eye when she said it. That is the part I still turn over. Not a flicker.

Let me tell you how we got to that doorstep, because it did not start that Tuesday.

We live on Larkspur Court, on the south side of Bowling Green, about ten minutes off Scottsville Road. Fourteen brick ranch houses around a circle of asphalt, built in the late seventies, every one of them with the same low roof and the same concrete porch. Dennis and I bought ours in 1999, when Amber was three weeks from being born. He was already on the line at the Corvette plant. I started in the front office at the elementary school the year she went to kindergarten, and I am still there.

Vicki and Gary moved in across from us in 2004. For twenty-two years she was the neighbor I would have named first if you had asked me who I trusted. She had my spare key. I had hers. She brought chicken and dumplings when my mother died. I sat with her in the waiting room at the Medical Center when Gary had his heart cath.

The packages started going missing in March.

The first one was Dennis’s work boots. Steel toe, $140, the only brand that does not wreck his knees. The tracking said delivered at 1:15 in the afternoon. When I got home at 3:40 the porch was empty.