The Gray Dress in My Closet
A while later I went to the ladies’ room, and Madison was in there at the sink, holding a wet paper towel under her eyes so her makeup would not run.
She jumped when she saw me in the mirror.
“Cheryl. Hi. Sorry. Allergies.”
“It’s October,” I said. “Everybody’s got something.”
She laughed, a little wet. She wadded up the towel. She did not leave.
“Did the dress fit?” she said. She said it to the sink.
“It fits.”
“Okay. Good.” She nodded too many times. “Mom thought the gray would be… She thought it would photograph better. With everything. She has a whole plan for the pictures. They’re going in the club magazine, she knows the lady who does it, and she said it has to look…” She stopped.
“It has to look a certain way,” I said.
“Yes.”
She finally looked up at me in the mirror. For one second I thought she was going to say it. Her mouth opened. I saw her get right up to the edge of it.
Then the door swung in and one of her bridesmaids came through, laughing, and Madison’s face closed back up like a shop at five o’clock.
“See you tomorrow!” she said, bright as a penny, and she was gone.
I stood there with my hands under the tap.
I had come into that restaurant with a stone in my chest that had her name carved on it. I am not going to pretend I walked out with nothing. She had still written that note. She had still walked into my bedroom and pushed my blue dress to the wall.
But I knew now whose sentences those were. I had heard the voice they came from, over the salads.
That girl had been wearing a gray dress her whole life. Hers just did not show.
The wedding was at four o’clock on Saturday, at a place called the Barn at Rush Creek, out past Bremen.
It was a real barn once. A dairy barn, from the look of the beams. Somebody had bought it and sanded it and hung it with about a mile of little white lights. There were mums in milk cans and hay bales nobody was meant to sit on.
Pete picked me up at two. He was in his funeral suit with a new tie.
I came out my front door in the gray dress.
He looked me up and down. Then his eyes stopped on my left arm.
“Cheryl. The note’s still on it.”
“I know it is.”
“You’re going to wear the note.”
“That’s where she put it,” I said. “I told you. I’m not adding and I’m not taking away.”
It was folded in half now, so the writing was on the inside, and the gold pin held it flat against the sleeve just above my wrist. From any distance it looked like a tag somebody forgot to cut off.
Pete opened the truck door for me. He has not done that since our mother’s funeral.
“The blue one’s in the back,” he said, when he got in. “On the hook. I went in your closet while you were getting your purse.”
“Pete.”
“I’m not saying anything. I’m saying it’s on the hook.”
We drove out through the hills with the leaves coming down across the road.
I held my purse in my lap with both hands. I was not nervous. That is the strange thing. I had been nervous for nineteen months, trying to work out what these people wanted me to be. Now I had it in writing.