The Wedding Dress My Neighbor Remade

I stood at her storm door more than once with my hand up to knock. I could picture her on the other side, not unkindly, waiting me out. Darlene is sixty-eight and has hemmed the trousers of half this county. She worked the alterations counter at the cleaners on Market Street for twenty-nine years, and after it closed she kept right on, at her kitchen table, taking in the church ladies’ slacks and letting out the football coaches’ jackets. She is a short woman with forearms like a baker, and she does not like to be asked what she is doing while she is doing it.

I put my hand down every time. I went home.

I weeded the strip along the fence, where, as it happens, the fence is six feet from her kitchen window. I watered a flowerbed that did not need watering. The light in that kitchen was on until eleven at night, and I know, because I was up.

On the ninth day I knocked after all, with a pan of chicken and noodles, and I told myself it was only that.

Darlene opened the door six inches. She had pins in her mouth. She took the pan with both hands and looked at me over it.

“Everything all right?” I said.

“Nothing’s been cut that you didn’t agree to,” she said around the pins. “The sleeves are off and the lining’s out. That’s all you’d see. Go home, Alvina. I’ll send for you.”

I went home.

The second week, Hailey started acting strange.

She came by on a Thursday with a loaf of banana bread, which she does not usually bake. She sat at my table and looked at the wall. Twice she began a sentence and ended it with “never mind.” Finally I said, “Hailey, what in the world,” and she said, “I can’t tell you, Grandma. I promised.”

“Promised who?”

“Mrs. Oster.”

I had known that was coming, and I still had to turn toward the stove. “What did she make you promise?”

“To stand on a milk crate in a camisole and leggings,” Hailey said, “and hold still and not ask questions.”

So that was how it went. Darlene had phoned Hailey on a Saturday and said she wanted to make a gift and needed some measurements and would she come by the back way, after her shift. Hailey had gone, and Darlene had measured her three separate times, around the bust and under it, the waist, the hip, the length from the base of her neck to the floor in her stocking feet, the span of her back from one shoulder point to the other.

“She wrote them on masking tape,” Hailey said, “and stuck the tape to the dress form.”

“What did you think she was making?”

“A veil,” Hailey said. “Maybe a garter. I figured it was something small.”

I did not tell her. I had said I would not, and I had said it to a woman who had asked me first.

“Is it something small?” Hailey said carefully.

“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth, because I had not seen it.