The Wedding Suit I Wore to the Hospital

The Cedar Closet

It was full dark when I pulled into the yard. The dog came out to meet me and I let him sniff my boots, which was more than he got most days.

I unhooked the trailer by the yard light, left my boots on the porch, and took my chore coat off and hung it on the nail outside the door. Then I went in and stood under the shower until the hot water ran out.

I scrubbed my hands with the orange soap I keep for calving. I scrubbed under my nails with Joanne’s little brush. I shaved, which I had not done since Sunday.

Then I stood in the bedroom in my towel and looked at my closet, and I did not have one thing in it that seemed right.

I have a navy suit from Penney’s that I wore to Joanne’s funeral. I could not put that on to meet my grandson. I would not do that to him or to me.

I have two good western shirts and a pair of pressed jeans for church. That would have been fine. That would have been plenty. Any other man would have stopped there.

But then I remembered the cedar closet at the end of the hall, where Joanne kept everything she could not throw away.

I had not opened it since the winter after she died. I had gone in once to look for her winter coat for her sister, and I had come out without it, and her sister understood.

The door stuck the way it always had. I gave it a shoulder. The smell of cedar came out at me, and under it, very faint, the smell of her hand lotion, which I had not known a smell could keep that long.

There it was, in a zippered garment bag at the very back. My wedding suit. Brown wool, wide lapels, June of 1979, bought at a men’s store in Kearney that has been a cell phone place for twenty years now.

Too Big

I was twenty-one when I got married in that suit. I weighed about a hundred and ninety pounds and most of it was shoulders from bucking bales.

I am sixty-eight now, and after Joanne died, I lost thirty pounds I did not mean to lose. There were a lot of nights that first year when supper was crackers standing up at the counter.

So when I put that suit on, it hung on me like it was still on the hanger.

The pants went past my waist a good three inches. I cinched them up with my good belt and punched a new hole in it with an awl from the shop. The coat sat out past my shoulders like a horse blanket on a yearling.

There was a brown tie folded in the inside pocket of the bag, narrow as a bootlace, the way they made them then. It took me four tries to get the knot right. Joanne always tied my ties. I never learned it properly because I never needed to.

I looked at myself in the long mirror on the back of the bedroom door, and I laughed out loud for the first time in I do not know how long.

“Well, Jo,” I said. “You’d say I look like a scarecrow at a funeral.”

She would have. And then she would have fixed my collar and said I looked handsome, because that is the kind of liar she was.