The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule

The message came in at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, while I had a bridesmaid’s hem under the needle and eleven more of them hanging on the rack behind me.

Three pictures, one after the other. Three dresses on three thin women who were all looking off to the side at nothing.

Then the words.

“Mom, these are the three I picked for you. Any of them works. The cheapest is $640. Please don’t go off the list, the photos have to look a certain way next to Kyle’s family. Love you.”

I took my foot off the pedal.

The machine stopped, and the house got very quiet, the way a house does when there is only one person left in it to make any noise.

I looked at the dresses again. One was called champagne. One was called mushroom. One was called dusty taupe, which is a name somebody made up so they would not have to say brown.

$640. $795. $890.

I do alterations out of the front corner of my house, in a town of about two thousand people in southern Indiana, forty minutes from anything with an escalator. I charge fourteen dollars to hem a pair of pants. I charge forty-five to hem a bridesmaid dress, more if it has a lining and a layer of that netting that fights you the whole way around. In prom season and wedding season I do all right. In January I sew patches on Carhartt coats and wait.

In a fair month, after thread and zippers and needles and the electric, my machine brings me about six hundred dollars. Roy’s survivor benefit from the county covers the house payment and not one thing more.

So the cheapest dress on my daughter’s list was a month of my work.

I want to be fair to Brittany, because she is my only child and I love her more than I have ever loved breathing. She did not write that message to be cruel. I know that now, and I think some part of me knew it then.

But I read it sitting under a forty-watt lamp in a house dress with pins stuck in the front of it, and what it said to me was this: Mom, I am afraid of what you will show up in.

I typed, “Thank you, honey. They’re all pretty. I’ll take care of it.”

She sent back a heart.

Then I finished the hem I was on, because the girl was coming for it at eight in the morning, and a thing like that does not stop being due because your feelings got hurt.

I did not sleep much.

Around one o’clock I got up and went and stood in the front room in the dark. On the piano there is a photograph in a silver frame that has been there since before Brittany could walk. Roy and me on the steps of the Methodist church, June 11, 1994. He is in a rented gray tuxedo that is a little short in the sleeve. I am in a white satin dress with sleeves the size of cantaloupes and a bow on the back you could have hung a porch swing from.

I made that dress.

I was twenty-two years old. I made it on my mother’s old Singer at her kitchen table, from a pattern that cost me six dollars and satin I bought at the fabric store in Jasper with money from my job at the shirt factory. Eleven yards.

It took me nine weeks of evenings.