The Dress on the Gift Table
I called her that night after Katie was in bed. I took the phone out to the back steps, where the cicadas were going so loud in the Hendersons’ walnut tree that I had to press it to my ear.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Thank you for the dress, Phyllis.”
There was a pause. I could hear her television, some game show, people clapping.
“Well,” she said. “You got it, then.”
“I got it this morning. It’s a lovely color.”
“It’s called dusty rose. It photographs well. I asked the girl on the telephone.” Another pause. I think she was waiting for the hurt in my voice, or the fight in it. “You read my note.”
“I did.”
“I’m not going to apologize for being honest, Jill. Somebody has to be. Scott certainly won’t say it.”
“No,” I said. “He won’t.”
“We’re having the photographer from Warsaw. I want the photographs nice. Forty years. People keep those.”
“I understand completely.”
“So you’ll try.”
I looked out at Katie’s bike lying on its side in the grass, and the lightning bugs coming up out of the lawn.
“It was thoughtful of you to write it all down,” I said. “I’ll make sure it gets to the party.”
She took that the way she wanted to take it.
“Good. And I’ve got you on the gift table, did Scott tell you? Somebody needs to keep the cards together and write down who brought what. You’re good at standing in one place.”
“I’ll be there early,” I said.
I hung up. I sat on the steps until the mosquitoes found me.
I did not have a plan yet. I only knew two things. I knew I was done crying in that woman’s powder room. And I knew that every word on that card was in her own hand.
Brenda is the hygienist at Dr. Hess’s. She has cleaned the teeth of half the county and she knows things about people that their own pastors do not. I showed her the note on our lunch break, out at the picnic table behind the office, and she read it with a baby carrot stopped halfway to her mouth.
“She pinned it on. With a pin.” Brenda set the carrot down. “Jill. Honey. What did Scott say?”
“That it’s just Mom.”
Brenda said a word that I will not put down here, since she teaches the three-year-olds on Sunday mornings.
“What are you going to do?”
“Buy a dress that fits,” I said. “And wear it, and look nice at my in-laws’ party.”
“And that?” She nodded at the card.
“I haven’t decided.”
But I had started to. It was the gift table that did it. You’re good at standing in one place. All week long I kept seeing it. A long folding table with a ruby red cloth, because the fortieth is the ruby anniversary and Phyllis had ordered everything to match. The card box. The presents stacking up. And me beside it with a notebook, writing down who brought what, while a hundred and twenty people came by one at a time and set things down.
Every one of them would come to that table. Every single one.
Brenda drove with me to Plymouth that Saturday. We went to the dress shop on Michigan Street, and I tried on six dresses in a fitting room with a curtain that did not close all the way.