The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

“Mom. What are you doing?”

“I’m trying it on,” she said. “I want to see if it still fits.”

It did. I helped her with the zipper in the back, and she turned to the long mirror on the back of the door and looked at herself. She was eighty-six. Her hair was white and thin and set every Friday at the beauty shop. Her shoulders had rounded. And in that dress, she was beautiful.

She took her pearl brooch, the one Dad gave her on their twenty-fifth anniversary, out of her jewelry box and pinned it at the neckline. “There,” she said.

“Mom, what are we doing?”

She met my eyes in the mirror. “Dennis didn’t invite me to his party,” she said. “So you are going to take me. As your date.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. “You are going to wear your navy dress,” she said, “and I am going to wear this one. And I am going to eat some of that prime rib that I paid for.”

“Your heart,” I said.

“My heart has been through worse than a party at the country club.” She turned sideways to the mirror, smoothing the skirt.

“I am not going to make a scene, Janet. I am not going to stand up and accuse him in front of his friends. I want to see my son’s face when he sees what I’m wearing. And then I want him to tell me the truth.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then he doesn’t.” She reached up behind her neck and touched the little manila tag. “But I’ll know, and he’ll know I know.”

I asked her if she wanted me to take the tag off. “No,” she said. “Leave it.”

The man at the dealership

I need to tell you something about my brother, because this is not a story about a bad man.

Dennis started at Holm Implement when he was nineteen. It was not called that then. It was Swenson Implement, and he swept the shop floor and changed oil in used tractors for old Earl Swenson. When Earl retired in 1994, Dennis bought the business with a loan our father cosigned, and he put his name on the sign.

For thirty years he sold farm equipment to the people we went to church with. Used tractors, balers, grain carts, the short-line stuff the big dealers in Watertown did not bother with. He knew which farmers were good for it and which ones needed another month. He let more than one man pay late in a bad year.

What none of us knew, that spring, was how bad the last two years had been. Commodity prices were down. Interest rates were up. Farmers who used to trade in a tractor every few years were patching the old one and making it go another season.

And a dealer like my brother does not own the equipment on his lot. He borrows against it from a floor plan lender, and he pays interest on every machine every month it sits there.

By April, he was paying interest on a lot full of machines nobody was buying. I did not know any of that yet. I only knew what Patty knew: that he’d said he had a good spring.