The Dress From the Cedar Chest
When I got home at ten thirty, my mother had the bodice cut and basted and the skirt pieces cut and pinned. She had done it all in four hours alone while I was gone, and she had not wasted an inch.
“Sit down and eat something,” she said. “Then you’re on the machine. My eyes are no good after ten.”
My Singer was on the kitchen table. Mom had brought hers too, an old black one with gold scrollwork that weighed as much as a feed sack. Two machines, two women, one kitchen. It was fifty-nine degrees in the house and I sewed in my scrubs because I did not want to take the time to change.
Around midnight the back door opened and Cory came in from the elevator. He set his cooler down. He looked at the table, at my mother pinning, at me bent over the machine with three pins in my mouth, and at the cedar chest he had hauled out to the kitchen for us that first night so we would have somewhere clean to lay the cut pieces.
He did not say anything. He went out to the garage, and I heard him rummaging, and he came back in with his big orange shop light, the one on the reel with the hook.
He stood behind my chair and held it up over the machine, close and angled, so the light fell right across the satin.
I could see every stitch. I could see the seam line like it was drawn in pencil.
“Better?” he said.
“Better,” I said.
He held that light for two hours. He had been on his feet at the elevator since six in the morning, running the dump and the leg and a dozen farmers who all wanted to be first. He did not sit down once. When his arm got tired, he switched to the other one.
Somewhere around two in the morning, Mom had gone into the living room to lie down on the couch for twenty minutes, and it was just the two of us. I was easing the bodice seam around the curve of the sweetheart neckline, very slowly.
I glanced up and caught him looking at me instead of the machine.
“What,” I said.
“You looked good in that dress, Jess,” he said. “That’s all. I was just thinking it.”
I kept my eyes down on the seam, because if I looked at him I was not going to be able to sew a straight line.
“You looked okay too,” I said.
“I looked like a kid in a rented tux,” he said. “You looked like something.”
That was all. That was the most Cory had said about our wedding in eighteen years. I finished the neckline and we didn’t talk about it again.
Wednesday was also Tiffany’s deadline. Wednesday came and went. I did not send the money, because I did not have the money, and I did not call, because there was nothing to say that would not make it worse for Makayla at school.
Tiffany texted me once, at four in the afternoon while I was on shift. “Hey Jess, just checking on Makayla’s dress. I have to take the extra back to Mankato tomorrow. Let me know!”
I wrote back, “Thank you for checking. She’s all set. See you Friday.”
Thursday night was the fitting.
It was the fourth night. When I came out of the bedroom after a nap, Mom had the dress hanging on the back of the pantry door.