The Dress My Neighbor Wore Saturday

And it was not only me. That was the thing about that spring and summer. Brenda lost a package in April. Jeff and Kim lost two. Carol and Tom at the end of the circle had something go missing in July. We all stood around at the mailboxes and shook our heads about the world, and Vicki stood right there with us, shaking hers.

Now. The dress.

Amber is our only child. She is twenty-six, a dental hygienist, and she was marrying a good, quiet boy named Kyle on the seventeenth of October at the little white church out in Alvaton where Dennis’s people are buried.

She did not ask for much. She wanted mums on the pews and barbecue at the reception, and she wanted her mother to feel pretty.

So in August the two of us drove down I-65 to a bridal shop in Franklin, Tennessee, an hour and ten minutes each way, and I tried on nine dresses in a fitting room the size of a pantry while my daughter sat on a velvet stool and told me the truth about each one.

The ninth was the dusty blue lace.

I came out and she did not say anything. She just put both hands over her mouth.

“That’s it, Mom,” she said. “That’s the one.”

It was $289, which is more than I have ever spent on a piece of clothing in my life. The sample was too big in the shoulders, so the woman at the shop, a lady named Diane, ordered my size and said they would ship it to the house in about five weeks.

While Amber was in the restroom, I asked Diane for one more thing.

“Could you sew something inside the hem?” I said. “Where nobody would see it. Their initials and the date. A and K, October seventeenth.”

“In white thread?” she said. “Like a secret?”

“Like a secret.”

I was going to show Amber the morning of the wedding. I had it all pictured. I would turn up the hem in the church basement, and she would read it, and we would both ruin our makeup.

The shop charged me $15 for the stitching. Diane sent me a picture of it before she boxed the dress up, tiny white letters on blue satin, neat as a hymnbook.

On the last Tuesday of September, my phone buzzed at my desk at 11:42 in the morning. Delivered. There was the photo, the flat white box behind my planter.

I took my lunch at 12:15 and drove home. Six minutes.

You know the rest of that part.

So there I was on Vicki’s welcome mat, with the wedding eighteen days off, looking at my dress on her body and a hallway full of boxes behind her.

I want to be honest about what went through me, because it was not noble.

I wanted to grab that tag and yank. I wanted to say every word I had in me, right there on her porch, loud enough for Brenda to hear it on the corner.