The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

Saturday the sixth

Amy, my daughter, drove up from Sioux Falls that Saturday afternoon. She is thirty, a nurse, and she had come up for her uncle’s birthday. I had called her on Friday night and told her everything, because Amy would have smelled it on me the second she walked in.

“Grandma’s going to wear the dress?” she said on the phone. “The dress?”

“The dress.”

There was a long silence. And then my daughter said, “Good for her.”

She came over to Mom’s early to help. She did Grandma’s lipstick, a soft rose color, and checked her pulse twice without being obvious about it, and put a little bottle of nitroglycerin tablets in the inside pocket of Grandma’s purse.

Mom let her. She liked being fussed over by Amy. She did not like being fussed over by anybody else.

“You don’t have to come in with us, honey,” Mom told her. “You were invited. Go on ahead and sit with the cousins.”

“I’ll be at the table by the door,” Amy said. “Right by the door, Grandma.”

The country club sits on the edge of town by the lake, a long low clubhouse with a nine-hole course and a dock where the kids fish for perch. It is not fancy, not like a city club. It is where everybody in town has their wedding receptions and their retirement parties and their fortieth anniversaries.

I parked close. Mom took my arm. The sun was still high at seven o’clock, the way it is in June up here, and the air smelled like lake water and cut grass and the charcoal from somebody’s grill out by the dock.

Inside, the party room was full. White tablecloths. Little votive candles. Patty had put up big gold balloons in the shape of a six and a zero over the head table. There were a hundred and twenty people in summer dresses and short-sleeved shirts, and the band from Aberdeen was setting up in the corner.

My brother was at the gift table in a sport coat, laughing, a drink in his hand. He saw us.

I watched it happen. I watched him see me, and then see who was on my arm, and then see what she was wearing. Everybody in our family knew that dress. Patty knew it. Half the women from church knew it, because Mom had shown it off at the Ladies Aid.

He did not move. The drink stayed exactly where it was, halfway to his mouth. People around him started to turn and look.

Mom smiled at him across the room and lifted one hand, just a little, like she was waving to him from a parade float. Then she said to me, quietly, “Find us a table, Janet. These shoes pinch.”