The Dress From the Cedar Chest
“My mom told me,” I said. “Last week.”
“You know what we were, growing up,” she said. “You know about us. Dad was gone, and Mom cleaned motel rooms out on the highway.
I went to my homecoming in a dress from the free box at the Methodist church. It was green. Everybody else had pink. I stood on that float in a green dress, and Tracy Lund said, loud, so I could hear it, ‘Who let the pickle on.'”
She took her hand down. She was crying now, the real way.
“Every year,” she said. “Every single year since Brooklyn was eight. I make it match so nobody can ever look at my girl and say that. So nobody can point. And then I did it. I did it to your girl. I stood in that commons and I did exactly the thing, and I didn’t even hear myself doing it until Brooklyn climbed down off that rack.”
I did not say anything for a minute. The coffee urn gurgled.
I could have said a lot of things. I had a lot of things saved up from Monday. I am not proud of it, but I had practiced some of them in the car.
What I said was, “Your Brooklyn is a good girl, Tiff.”
“She is,” Tiffany said, and laughed a little through her crying. “She won’t talk to me. She told me in the truck she was ashamed of me.”
“She’ll talk to you,” I said. “She climbed down because of who raised her. You raised her.”
Tiffany wiped her face with a napkin from the dispenser.
“I’ll pay you for the dress,” she said. “The one-fifty. I’ll pay you for your mom’s time. I’ll do anything.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said. “That’s not what this was.”
“Then what do you want?”
I thought about it. I thought about the four girls on the bales, and the one girl at the end of the lunch table with her knee pads down around her ankles.
“Next year,” I said, “let them wear whatever they want. Let it not match. And come sit with us for the second half. Mom’s freezing and she’d like the company. She always liked you better than your mother did, I think.”
Tiffany laughed so hard she had to sit down on the cooler behind the counter. Then she made two hot chocolates, and she put the second one in my hand too, and she didn’t let me pay for either of them.
She did come sit with us. She sat next to my mother under the stadium blanket for the whole second half, and when we lost by the field goal, my mother patted her knee.
Saturday morning, the day of the dance, my mother came over early to steam the dress one more time.
I was standing at the ironing board, and she was sitting at the kitchen table with her coffee. She waited until Makayla was in the shower. Then she said, “Jessica, come here. Bring the dress.”
I brought it. She turned the skirt inside out across her lap and found the hem at the back, right in the center, where the zipper seam ran down. She folded back a few inches of the hem and held it up to the window.