The Lavender Dress Went to the Party

The room

The room laughed. It was a big warm laugh, because everybody in that room loved my mother and everybody thought she was making a joke. Old Evelyn, eighty-six, wearing her burial dress to her son’s birthday, making a crack about her funeral money. That’s Evelyn for you. Isn’t she something.

And then the laugh started to die. Not all at once. It went out like ripples in the lake. Because Dennis was not laughing.

He was sitting at the head table with his hands folded and his face gone a dull red, all the way up into his hair. And Patty, beside him, was looking at him, and her smile was slowly going away.

The people who were closest saw it first. Then the next tables. I watched it travel across the room until the only sound was the band’s amplifier humming in the corner.

Mom handed the microphone back to Ron. “Thank you, Ronald,” she said. “You always did tell a good story.”

She sat down beside me. She picked up her coffee cup. Her hand was perfectly steady. Under the table, I took her other hand. It was ice cold.

The coat room

Dennis got up first. He did not look at anybody. He walked across the room, not fast, and stopped beside our table.

“Mom,” he said. “Could I talk to you a minute?”

“I’d like that,” she said.

He looked at me. “Janet, could you…”

“Janet comes,” Mom said. “She’s my date.”

It was June, so nobody had coats. The coat room was just a little room off the hallway with empty hangers and a rack of the club’s folding chairs and a window that looked out on the dock. Somebody had left a cardigan on one of the hangers. Dennis closed the door behind us.

I stayed by the door. Mom sat down on one of the folding chairs, carefully, smoothing the lavender skirt under her.

My brother stood in front of her for a long time without saying anything. Then he sat down on the floor. Just sat right down on the carpet in his sport coat in front of her chair, the way he used to sit at her feet when we watched Lawrence Welk.

“I was going to put it back,” he said.

“When?” Mom said.

“I don’t know.” He put his face in his hands. “I don’t know, Mom.”

“Tell me why, Dennis. I don’t want to hear sorry yet. I want to hear why.” And so my brother told her.