The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule
Three weeks before the wedding, she came to my front door with a garment bag.
“Carol Jean, I hope this isn’t awkward,” she said. “The shop in Louisville wanted two hundred dollars and three weeks to take up the hem and fix the shoulders, and everybody says you’re the one.”
It was champagne. Of course it was. A beautiful dress, heavy crepe, and it had cost more than my car was worth.
It also did not fit her. The shoulders stood off her like a coat on a hanger, and the hem broke on the floor.
I will say this plainly. I had her dress on my table for a week, the same week I had my own in the dye kettle. I could have done a middling job. No one would ever have known but me.
I did the best work of my life on that dress.
I took the shoulders up from the inside so the seam did not show. I raised the hem and put a narrow weight in it so it would hang. I found a place at the back waist where the factory had sewn it crooked, and I fixed that too, and I did not charge her for it.
That is how my mother raised me to sew. You do not put your feelings into another woman’s seams.
I charged her sixty-five dollars. She gave me eighty and told me to keep it.
My own dress was hanging in the back bedroom, behind a closed door, drying.
“And what did you settle on?” she asked me at the door, with the garment bag over her arm. “Brittany said she sent you some lovely options.”
“She did,” I said. “I’ve got it taken care of.”
“Wonderful,” Suzanne said.
The wedding was the second Saturday in June, at two in the afternoon, at the Methodist church where I married Roy. Brittany wanted it there. Whatever she was scared of, she still wanted to be married where her daddy stood.
I had not told her about the dress. Deb said I should, every night for a month.
I will be honest with you about why I did not tell her. It was not to teach her a lesson. I was afraid that if I told her on the telephone, she would cry and say, “Mom, please, just this once, do what I asked,” and I would have had no answer for it. I did not have $640. I had a blue dress and a month of nights.
I thought if she could see it, she would understand. And if she saw it and still did not understand, I had a plan for that too. I had my gray church suit hanging in the car on a hanger, pressed.
I would have changed in the Sunday school room and never said a word about it for the rest of my life.
Deb zipped me up at my house at noon. It zipped like a drawer closing.
She stood back and put her hand over her mouth.
“Don’t,” I said. “I did my own mascara and I am not good at it.”
“Roy would fall down,” she said.
“Roy would say, ‘Is that new?'”
We got to the church at one.
Brittany was in the bride’s room off the vestibule with the door closed.
I stood in the vestibule by the guest book, under the picture of Jesus knocking at the door, with my pocketbook in both hands like a girl waiting on a school bus.
People had started coming in. Ladies from church. My customers, half of them.