The Fifteen Dollars in My Father’s Hand

“Dad, I’d take Mom’s canisters if nobody wants them out.”

“They’re downstairs, Em. Everything’s downstairs. Nobody’s throwing anything away.”

He would say it looking at the television, and nod, and then nothing would happen, and I would feel like a child for asking twice.

Everything’s downstairs. That was the promise. The basement was where my mother was being kept, and as long as she was down there in boxes with my father’s block printing on the lids, I told myself I could wait until he was ready.

He had packed those boxes himself, the week after the funeral. All of it in four days, like a man bailing a boat. Then he had come up the stairs and, as far as I know, never gone down them again except to change the furnace filter.

So when Sharon told me to pay like everyone else, I stepped out to the corner of the garage and looked down the driveway at my father’s back.

I could have walked down there and said it out loud. Dad, she’s selling Mom’s wedding dress. That is the sensible thing. I know it is.

But I had been saying things out loud to my father for two years, and he had a way of nodding at them and not hearing. I was afraid, I think, that he would nod at this one too. That he would say, “Now, Em, let’s not have a fuss in front of people,” and I would have to live the rest of my life knowing he had said it.

I did not think I could stand that.

I could also have carried the dress straight to my car. But Sharon had just told me nothing walked off her tables, and by supper it would have been her word against mine, and my father would never have seen that tag.

So I did the only other thing I could think of.

I reached up and took the dress off the rack, hanger and all.

Before I moved, I turned the left cuff inside out, right beside that safety pin, because I needed to know.

It was still there.

A forget-me-not, no bigger than my smallest fingernail, stitched in blue floss on the inside of the cuff where no one would ever see it. Five petals and a yellow knot for the center. My great-grandmother Helen put it there in the spring of 1991, with a needle she could barely see to thread, so that my mother would have her something blue.

Mom showed it to me that day on the basement steps. She said, “Nobody at the whole wedding knew that was there but me and Grandma Helen. And now you.”

I folded the cuff back down over it.

“Emily,” Sharon said. Her voice had a little less starch in it. I think she had seen my face. “Don’t make this a thing.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m paying.”

I laid the dress over my left arm, the way you carry a child who has fallen asleep, and I walked down the driveway.

It is about forty feet. I passed the Pyrex. I passed the tablecloth. I passed a shoebox of my mother’s sewing patterns and her blue cornflower Corningware and a lamp from their bedroom. I did not stop at any of it.

Behind me I could hear that nobody had started shopping again.

My father looked up when my shadow fell across the TV tray.

“Hey, Em. You find something?”

“I did.”