The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule
Brittany got down on her knees on the vestibule carpet, in her wedding dress, and put her fingers on her father’s initials.
She did not say anything for a while. Neither did I.
“He’s walking me down,” she said finally. “Isn’t he. He’s going.”
“The whole way,” I said.
That is when Suzanne came in from the sanctuary.
I heard her heels first. She had on the champagne dress, and I will say it hung on her like it had grown there.
She took in the whole scene in one look. The bride on the floor with her makeup gone. The mother of the bride in pale blue with her hem turned up. Deb standing by the coat rack with her arms folded like a woman ready to drive a bus through a wall.
“What on earth,” Suzanne said.
Brittany got up. I watched her do it. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, and she stood up straight, and she stepped in front of me. Not beside me. In front.
“Suzanne,” she said. “My mother’s wearing blue.”
“I can see that.”
“I sent her a list of dresses to pick from, because of what you said at the shower about the photographs, and I never should have. She didn’t use it. If the blue’s a problem for the pictures, then I’ll stand next to her in every one of them and it can be a problem for me too.”
It was quiet in that vestibule. You could hear the organist in the sanctuary, running through something soft.
Suzanne did not answer her right away.
She walked up to me instead. She looked at the neckline. She looked at the sleeve where it met the shoulder. Then, and I had not expected this, she reached out with two fingers and touched the side panel, at my ribs, and ran her fingers down the seam.
“Turn around,” she said.
I turned around.
“Somebody set those panels in by hand,” she said. “And the lace is a shade under the satin. On purpose.” She stepped back. “That’s the best-made dress in this building, and I’m including the one I’ve got on. Who did it? You didn’t get that in Louisville.”
Before I could open my mouth, Brittany said, “She did.”
“She altered it?”
“She made it. In 1994. She married my dad in it, in this church. It’s in the picture on our piano. And last month she cut it down and dyed it on her kitchen stove because I sent her a list she couldn’t pay for.”
Suzanne looked at me.
I have altered clothes for women for thirty years. I know what a face does when a woman sees herself all the way around in the mirror for the first time, the back as well as the front. Hers did that.
“You had my dress on your table,” she said slowly. “The same week.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you fixed that back seam. It has pulled to the left since the day I bought it, and it doesn’t now. You didn’t say anything and you didn’t charge me.”
“It was crooked,” I said. “I couldn’t leave it.”
She did something then I did not see coming. She laughed, one short breath, and her eyes filled up.
“My mother took in sewing,” she said. “In Tell City. Out of our front room, with a card in the window. I spent my whole girlhood being the girl whose mother sewed for people.” She shook her head. “I believe I have spent forty years making sure nobody could tell. And then I stood up at a shower and said neutrals, like a fool, in front of the one woman in the room who would have understood me.”