The Dress From the Cedar Chest
Then Kaylee came down. Then Ava looked around at the empty bales, and laughed in a nervous way, and said, “Well, I’m not sitting up here by myself,” and climbed down too.
Five girls standing on the gravel of the Lutheran church parking lot. Four in navy blue. One in ivory satin.
The boys looked at each other. Then the tall one, the Lindgren boy, who plays tight end, said, “We’re walking too, I guess,” and all five of them walked around the hay rack and stood behind the girls.
Tiffany stood there with her clipboard against her chest.
I watched her. And I want to tell you that I felt good, that I felt like I had won, because that is what you want me to say. But that is not what I felt.
What I saw was a forty-four-year-old woman in a booster club fleece standing next to a hay rack she had spent nine years making perfect, with nobody on it. And I saw her face. It was not angry. It was something worse than angry. It looked like a little girl’s face.
The parade marshal came walking down the line with his radio. He is the Legion commander, Jerry Sundquist, eighty-one years old, in his Legion cap.
“Tiffany, what’s going on?” he said. “We’re rolling in three minutes.”
“Jerry,” I said, “the court’s going to walk today. Right behind the float. If that’s all right.”
Jerry looked at Makayla’s dress for a long moment.
“Darlene,” he said to my mother. “Did you make that?”
“Jessica and I did,” Mom said. “It was her wedding dress.”
Jerry nodded slowly. “I was at that wedding,” he said. “Yes. Well. The court walks. Dale, you drive slow so these girls can keep up in those shoes.”
And that was how it was decided.
The court float rolled down Main Street empty that day. The white skirting and the paper flowers and the wooden sign that said HOMECOMING COURT, and nobody on the bales but Brooklyn’s folded white jacket.
Behind it, ten kids walked down the middle of Main Street together. Makayla in the middle in ivory. Brooklyn on one side of her and Hannah on the other, holding hands. The boys behind them in their navy ties.
I walked on the sidewalk next to them with my mother on my arm. Cory had come up from the elevator by then, and he walked on her other side, in his work jacket, with his hand on the small of her back.
I have been going to that parade my whole life. I have never once heard the people on Main Street clap like that.
I looked over at my mother. She was crying, very quietly, with her chin up.
“You did that,” I said.
“No,” she said. “That Ostrander girl did that. Good for her.”
The game that night we lost by a field goal. Nobody seemed to care much.
At halftime I went up to the concession stand to get Mom a hot chocolate. The concession stand is run by the booster club, and Tiffany was working it, because Tiffany works everything.
Tiffany was working it alone. When she saw me at the window, she set down the coffee pitcher and put both hands flat on the counter.
“Jess,” she said.
“One hot chocolate, please,” I said. “For my mom.”
“I didn’t know it was your wedding dress,” she said.
“I know.”
“I should have known. I saw it and I thought, I know that dress, and I couldn’t think from where. And then I saw your mother standing there, and I knew.” She stopped. “My mom was so mean about that dress. At your wedding. I remember. I was twenty-five, and I remember her saying it in the car.”