The Dress on the Gift Table
It looked like a gift. A pretty dress on a stand, with a card on it in the nicest handwriting in the county.
My hands were shaking. I will not pretend they were not. I went to the ladies’ room and ran cold water over my wrists and looked at myself in the navy dress under that awful fluorescent light, and I said out loud, to nobody, “You did not write it.”
Then I went back out and stood in one place.
Don and Phyllis came in at six on the dot. He was in his good gray suit with his post pin on the lapel. She was in ruby red, of course, a sheath with a matching jacket, her hair set that afternoon, and she swept through that door like the hall had been built for the purpose.
She saw me before she saw anything else. She looked me up and down, slowly, the way she always did. Navy dress to shoes and back.
“I see you didn’t manage it,” she said.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “But I brought it.”
She was already waving at someone over my shoulder. The photographer from Warsaw had arrived with his bags, and she went off to tell him where to stand. She never looked at the table. Why would she? She had assigned it to me.
Don stopped, though. Don always stopped.
“You look real nice, Jill,” he said.
“Thank you, Don. Happy anniversary.”
He patted my arm and went on in. He did not look at the table either. Of everyone in that hall, he was the one I was sorry about.
Scott had Katie by the hand. He was two steps behind his parents and he had his eyes on his mother, making sure she had what she needed, the way he did.
“I’m going to help Mom with the photographer,” he said. “You good here?”
“I’m good here.”
He went.
The first guest to set a present down was Carol, from Phyllis’s Sunday school class. She had a gift bag with red tissue coming out the top, and she tucked it in beside the card box and said, “Well, don’t you look pretty,” and then she noticed the dress.
“Oh, now, what’s this? Isn’t that darling.”
She leaned in to read the card.
I wrote in my notebook. Carol. Gift bag, red.
When I looked up, her hand was at her mouth.
She read it again. I could see her lips moving a little. Then she looked at the dress, the smallness of it, and then at me, and her whole face went soft and stricken.
“Honey,” she said. “Is this…”
“It came in the mail the last week of August,” I said.
That was all I said. It was all I said to anyone, the whole night.
Carol opened her mouth and closed it. She squeezed my wrist, hard, and went straight across the hall to her sister Judy, who was hanging up her coat, and brought her back by the elbow.
Judy read it. Judy said, “Well, I never,” very quietly, the way a woman says it when she has.
After that I did not have to do anything but write down names.
Linda, the pastor’s wife, with a ruby glass vase in a box with a cellophane window. She read the card and stood very straight, and set her vase down on the left side of the dress as carefully as if she were laying a wreath.