The Dress From the Cedar Chest
Cory set down his cooler. He went over and put his arms around her, and she let him, which she doesn’t always anymore. He looked at me over the top of her head.
“Okay,” he said into her hair. “Okay. I won’t go. But you’re riding on that float.”
“Dad.”
“You’re riding on that float,” he said. “Your mom will think of something. She always does.”
Then he went to take a shower, and Makayla went back to bed, and I sat at the table alone with that sentence. Your mom will think of something. I did not have anything.
I went into our bedroom to get an extra blanket for Makayla’s bed, because it was down to fifty-eight in the house even with the space heaters going.
The extra blankets are in the cedar chest at the foot of our bed. It was my grandmother’s chest. It still smells like her house, cedar and Jergens and something like old church hymnals.
I lifted out the quilt and the wool blanket, and underneath was the long white garment bag.
I had not unzipped it in eighteen years. I unzipped it now, sitting on the floor, and there it was.
I should tell you about that dress. Cory and I got married in 2007, when I was twenty-two and he was twenty-four. We had saved for the reception and the down payment on a trailer. We had not saved for a wedding gown, because I did not know wedding gowns cost what they cost.
I found it at a consignment shop in Owatonna, on a rack in the back. The tag pinned inside said the original bride had worn it in June of 1996. It was sixty dollars. It had enormous puffed sleeves, the kind every bride had in the nineties, and a bodice with seed pearls, and a train that went on forever.
Everybody at my wedding said it looked dated. My mother said it looked like a princess dress. I wore it with my grandmother’s veil, which was older than all of us, and I had never felt so pretty in my life.
I sat on the floor of my bedroom with that ivory satin in my lap, and I started counting yards in my head the way my mother taught me.
The skirt alone was five panels. The train was easily another three yards. Satin, a good heavy duchess satin, a little yellowed at the folds but nothing a careful wash couldn’t handle.
I looked at the clock on Cory’s nightstand. It was twelve fifty-two in the morning on Tuesday. The parade was Friday at two.
I picked up the phone and called my mother.
My mother, Darlene, is sixty-six years old. She worked thirty-one years as a seamstress at the alterations counter of a department store in Owatonna until it closed, and then she did alterations out of her house for every bride and every funeral in three counties.
She taught me to sew on her Singer when I was nine. I made a pillowcase first, then an apron, then a jumper for church that I wore until it was up past my knees. Everything I know about a needle, she put in my hands at her kitchen table.
She picked up on the second ring. My mother has always picked up on the second ring, no matter what time it is.
“Jessica. What’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “Mom, can you take apart a wedding dress?”
There was a pause on the line. I heard her sit up.
“Whose?” she said.