The Dress From the Cedar Chest
Every class builds a float on a hay rack. The court float goes last, right before the fire truck. It is always the prettiest one, and that is because of Tiffany, I will give her that. She keeps the chicken wire and the white skirting in her garage all year. She folds every one of those tissue paper flowers herself.
Every year, it matches. Nobody had ever said a word against it, because nobody had ever not been able to pay.
In the car, Makayla stared out the windshield at the elevator legs lit up against the sky. My husband, Cory, is the foreman out there. In late September with the beans coming in, the lights stay on until midnight and the trucks are lined up down the county road.
“It’s fine, Mom,” she said. “I’ll just walk behind. Lots of people walk in the parade.”
“You’re not walking behind,” I said.
“Mom. I know about the furnace.”
That stopped me. I had not known she knew.
Here is the furnace.
On the nineteenth of September, a Saturday, I woke up at four in the morning and the house was fifty-four degrees. Cory went down to the basement with a flashlight and came back up and said a word he does not say in front of Makayla.
A new one was forty-six hundred dollars, installed. They would finance it. The first payment was due on the first of October, and the install would not be until the first week of October, because everybody in three counties apparently waits until September to find out their furnace is dead.
I am a CNA. Cory runs a grain elevator crew. We do fine. We have never once been behind on anything, and we do not have forty-six hundred dollars sitting anywhere. What we had was a little in savings, which went to the down payment, and my paycheck, and his paycheck, and two space heaters we bought at Fleet Farm.
I thought about asking my mother. My mother lives on Social Security and what she makes doing alterations. She would have given it to me in a heartbeat. That is exactly why I could not ask.
So that is the furnace. And my seventeen-year-old daughter knew about every bit of it, because the walls in our house are thin and I had apparently not been as quiet on the phone with the heating company as I thought.
Cory came home at twelve fifteen that night with bean dust in the creases of his neck and the smell of the dryer on his jacket. I was sitting at the kitchen table in a sweatshirt with my hands around a cup of coffee I had not drunk.
I told him. I told him the whole thing, the bags and the gold letters and “you can walk behind.”
“I’ll go over there,” he said. “Right now. She’s up. Her lights are on.”
“Cory, it’s after midnight.”
“Then in the morning. She’s my cousin, Jess. She’ll listen to me.”
Makayla came out of her room in her socks. She had been listening, of course. She stood in the hallway with her arms folded tight.
“Dad, please don’t,” she said. “Please. Then I’m the girl whose dad had to go over and ask. Brooklyn will know. Everybody will know by lunch.”
“Kayla, she can’t talk to you like that.”
“She didn’t talk to me like anything,” Makayla said, and her voice went up and cracked. “She just said it has to match. And it does have to match, that’s the whole float. I just don’t.”
That last part was what got me. I just don’t. My daughter, who was voted onto the court by her class, standing in a cold hallway in her socks, explaining why she didn’t count.