The Dress From the Cedar Chest
“You look like you,” I said. “Just more.”
The court float was at the end of the line, right in front of the fire truck. It was beautiful, I will always say that. A hay rack skirted in white, with paper flowers in navy and white along every edge, and a big wooden sign that said HOMECOMING COURT in Tiffany’s careful hand lettering. It was hitched to Tiffany’s husband Dale’s pickup.
The four girls were already up on the bales. Navy blue dresses, little white boutique jackets buttoned up against the wind. They looked lovely. They looked like a picture.
The five boys were standing around the pickup in matching navy ties, punching each other in the arms.
And Tiffany was standing at the front of the rack with a clipboard, in a navy fleece with the booster club logo, checking things off.
Makayla walked across the gravel. Her dress caught the sun every time she moved. People along the line of floats stopped what they were doing. A couple of the band moms turned around.
Tiffany looked up from her clipboard.
She looked at the dress. She looked at it the way you look at something you are trying to place. Then she looked at me, behind Makayla. Then at my mother, behind me. Her face went still.
“Makayla,” she said. Her voice was very calm. “That’s not the dress.”
“No, ma’am,” Makayla said.
“It doesn’t match,” Tiffany said. “Honey, I’m sorry. You know I told you. You can walk behind, Makayla. That’s fine. Lots of kids walk.”
Nobody on that hay rack said a word. The four girls looked down at their hands. The boys stopped punching each other. Somewhere up the line the marching band was warming up, a trumpet going up and down the same scale.
I opened my mouth. I did not know what I was going to say. Something polite. Something that would end with us walking behind a hay rack, together, the three of us, and me holding my daughter’s hand all the way down Main Street.
But before I could say anything, Brooklyn moved.
Brooklyn Ostrander, seventeen, Tiffany’s only daughter, sitting on the front bale in her navy blue boutique dress. She was looking down at Makayla’s dress. She looked at it for a long time, at the little curve of pearls at the neckline and the way the satin moved in the wind.
Then she started unbuttoning her little white boutique jacket.
She did it slowly, one button at a time, her fingers stiff from the cold. She took the jacket off and folded it in half and laid it on the bale beside her.
“Brooklyn,” Tiffany said. “Honey, it’s cold. Put that back on.”
Brooklyn climbed down off the hay rack. She jumped the last two feet onto the gravel in her heels and almost turned her ankle, and caught herself on the wheel.
She walked over and stood next to my daughter.
“I’m walking behind with Makayla,” she said.
“Brooklyn.”
“Mom,” Brooklyn said. Her voice was shaking, but she said it. “It’s her mom’s wedding dress. Look at it. It’s her mom’s wedding dress, and her grandma sewed it, and you’re going to make her walk behind the float in it? I’m not riding up there if she’s not.”
Tiffany’s face went white, then red.
Then Hannah Brekke climbed down. She did not say anything. She just handed her bouquet to one of the boys and climbed down off the back of the rack and came and stood next to Brooklyn.