The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

Telling Mom

She was at the kitchen table with her crossword and a cup of coffee gone cold. The radio was on low, the farm report out of Watertown, corn and soybean prices. She turned it off when she saw my face.

“Sit,” she said. “You look like you’ve been to a wake.”

I sat. I took the deposit slip out of my purse and smoothed it flat on the oilcloth in front of her. She put on her reading glasses and looked at it for a long time.

“Two hundred dollars and forty-one cents,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I gave you a check for one hundred.”

“Yes, Mom.”

She took the glasses off and folded them. Her hands were steady. They are always steady. It is her heart that flutters, never her hands.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “You have more. I can see it.”

So I told her about Patty in the cereal aisle. The club deposit. Almost nine thousand. The prime rib, the band from Aberdeen, the open bar. And I told her that Dennis had said the party would be too late and too loud for her, and that he was going to bring her cake.

She did not say anything for a while. Out the window, her neighbor was mowing, and the smell of cut grass came in through the screen.

“Every Sunday,” she finally said. “I asked him every Sunday.”

“I know.”

“And he looked me in the eye.”

“I know, Mom.”

I reached across the table for her hand. She let me hold it for a moment, and then she patted mine twice and took hers back, the way she did when I was little and she needed to think.

“What do you want to do?” I asked her.

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to go down to his office and put that slip on his desk.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

“Mom.”

“Janet. It is my money and it is my son. I’ll decide.” She tapped the deposit slip with one finger. “You did right to bring it to me first. Now you let me think about it.”

The closet

On Friday she called me at seven in the morning. “Come over,” she said. “And bring your navy dress. The nice one, from Amy’s wedding.”

“Why?”

“Just bring it.”

When I got there, she was standing in her bedroom in front of the closet, with the door open. I knew what was in that closet. Everybody in the family knew. At the far end, in a clear plastic bag from the dry cleaner, hung the lavender dress.

She had bought it in Sioux Falls in 2017, the same year she sat down with Mr. Lund. It was a soft lavender, with a scooped neckline and three-quarter sleeves and a skirt that moved when you walked.

She said she had always looked good in purple and she did not see why she should stop just because she was dead.

Mr. Lund had given her a little manila tag, the kind with a reinforced hole and a string, with her name and her file number written on it in his square handwriting. She had pinned it inside the collar with a safety pin.

“So nobody brings the wrong one,” she said. “Your father’s mother was buried in a dress she hated because nobody asked.” She unzipped the plastic bag now and slid the dress out.