The Dress My Neighbor Wore Saturday

But I have worked in a school office for twenty-one years. I have watched a great many people get caught at a great many things, and I know what a person does when she is cornered with nobody watching.

She cries. She calls her husband. She says, “Lori has lost her mind, she came to my door and accused me of stealing a dress my own husband bought me.” And then that dress goes into a black trash bag and out to the curb in somebody else’s can before the sun sets, and so does everything in that hallway.

Then it is my word against hers. And hers is the word of the woman who brings banana bread.

All of that went through me in about the time it takes to breathe in.

So I breathed out, and I smiled at her.

“Well,” I said. “It looks lovely on you.”

Something eased in her face. Her shoulders came down an inch.

“You think so? It’s not too young?”

“Not a bit. That color is perfect on you.” I made myself look at it the way you look at a friend’s new dress. “You know what, you ought to wear it Saturday.”

Saturday was the block party. First Saturday in October, every year since before we moved in. Vicki and Gary had hosted it for the last fifteen, because they had the big covered patio and because Gary smoked a pork shoulder that people on that street talked about all year.

Vicki laughed, a little too high. “To a cookout? Lori, it’s lace.”

“It’s your anniversary dress,” I said. “Gary went to all that trouble. Let him show you off. Everybody will want to see it.”

She touched her hair. She has always liked being looked at. I do not say that to be ugly. It is simply the truest thing I know about her.

“Maybe I will,” she said.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.” She smiled, and it was her real smile, the one I had known for twenty-two years. “You’re sweet. Now, did you need something, hon?”

I looked down at the phone in my hand, at the picture of the box.

“No,” I said. “I just came to say hello.”

I walked back across the circle. I did not hurry. I went in my house, shut the door, sat down on the bench where we take off our shoes, and shook for a good ten minutes.

Then I went back to work, because the buses come at 2:50 whether your heart is broken or not.

I told no one. I want that understood. I did not tell Dennis and I did not tell Amber.

It was the hardest four days of my married life.

Dennis came in at 4:15 and found me peeling potatoes I did not need.

“Dress come?” he said.

“Not yet.”

“Tracking said today.”

“I know what it said.”

He looked at me a long moment. Twenty-eight years, he knows when to leave a thing lie. He got a glass of tea and went out to the garage.

If I had told him, he would have walked across that street. He would not have yelled, that is not him, but he would have knocked on the door and asked Gary man to man, and Gary would have turned to Vicki, and I would be right back at the trash bag.