The Blue Dress In The Church Vestibule
“Suzanne,” I said.
“No, let me. I owe it.” She turned to Brittany. “You were afraid of me. I could see you were, and I let you be, because some part of me liked it. I’m ashamed of that. Your mother can wear blue. Your mother can wear anything she pleases. And I’ll tell that photographer myself where she stands.”
She did, too. I heard her do it, out on the church steps afterward. “The bride’s mother goes in the middle. No, the middle. You’ll build the rest of us around the blue.”
But that was later.
Right then, Deb came off the coat rack and said, “It is one forty-eight and that child has no face on,” and everything started moving at once.
The girl from the beauty shop came running with her case and did what she could. It took nine minutes. Brittany sat on the piano bench in the bride’s room with her chin up and her eyes closed, and I stood behind her and held her veil out of the powder.
“Mom,” she said, with her eyes still shut.
“Hm.”
“Is there any of it left? What you cut off?”
“The train? Some. Scraps. It’s in a sack at home.”
Her face fell a little.
“Why?”
“I just thought.” She opened her eyes, and the girl told her to shut them again, and she did. “I’ve got something old. Grandma’s bracelet. And something new, and I borrowed Aunt Deb’s handkerchief, and my garter’s blue. But I don’t have anything of his. I didn’t think about it until I saw him in your hem. I don’t have one thing of Daddy’s on me.”
I did not say anything.
I picked up my pocketbook off the dressing table and I opened it.
A seamstress does not go to a wedding without a kit. I have been called out of the pew three times in my life to sew a bridesmaid back into her dress. Needle, thread, small scissors, safety pins, a thimble.
And in the zipper pocket, folded in a square of tissue, a piece of lace about the size of a playing card.
It was the last scrap from the train. Still white. I had cut it away before I dyed anything, the part of the lace with the best of the pattern in it, a rose and two leaves. I had not been able to put it in the sack with the rest.
I unfolded the tissue and held it out where she could see it.
Brittany opened her eyes. The beauty shop girl gave up.
“That’s from it,” Brittany said. “That’s from the white.”
“From the train. I walked up that aisle out there with this dragging behind me. Your daddy stepped on it at the altar. Twice.”
“Can you put it on me? Somewhere. I don’t care where. Can you sew it on?”
I looked at her dress. I was not going to put a needle in that dress five minutes before the music.
Then I looked at her bouquet, lying on the table. White peonies from Deb’s own yard, with the stems wrapped in ivory ribbon.
“Give me those,” I said.
I sat down on the piano bench beside my daughter. I put on my reading glasses. I threaded a needle with the only thread I had in the kit that day, which was what was left on the spool from my own seams.