The Red Dress at the VFW Hall

The Wigs

Pam fit both wigs that afternoon in the little private room at the back of her shop. Marlene sat on a folding chair in the corner and watched with her purse in her lap.

When Pam set the brown one on my head and adjusted it and turned me toward the mirror, I heard Marlene make a small sound behind me.

I looked at her in the glass. She had her hand over her mouth.

“There you are,” she said.

The second one was a little shorter, for church. Marlene paid for it with a check from the checkbook she has carried in her purse for as long as I have known her. She wrote it out very carefully, in her neat school-taught hand.

Out in the parking lot, she hugged me. Not the two pats on the back like the day she put the jar on the counter. A real hug, long, her cheek against my temple.

“I’m going to drive you on the Tuesdays Nick can’t,” she said. “If you’ll let me.”

“I’ll let you,” I said.

The Rest of It

She drove me eleven times. I counted. She brought a thermos of coffee and a sack of her molasses cookies, which I could not taste but ate anyway because she made them.

She did the word search in the paper out loud and made me find the hard ones.

Harold came twice, on the days Marlene had a doctor’s appointment of her own.

He sat in the plastic chair with his seed cap on his knee and told me trucking stories I had heard a dozen times, and I laughed at every one.

Sunday dinner started back up the week after the party. The coffee can went back on the counter, too.

Marlene put a new strip of masking tape on it. This time it said “Gas money for Sioux Falls.” Nobody ever let it get empty.

Nick kept his head shaved the whole way through my treatment. Two of the guys from the elevator shaved theirs too.

Walt said he’d have done it, but he’d beaten us all to it by about forty years.

I finished chemo in February. I had surgery in March and radiation through April. My last scan, in June, was clear.

My hair grew back curly, which it had never been before, and Marlene says it is the prettiest it has ever looked.

I went back to my kindergarten class in the fall. The little boy who drew me with purple hair and a crown had moved up to first grade, but he came down to my room the first morning to see if I was really back. He told me he liked the curls.

The Dress

People ask me sometimes if I was trying to shame her that night. I tell them the truth. I wasn’t. I was just done hiding.

I didn’t know what would happen when I walked into that hall. I only knew I wasn’t going to wear a scarf to make anybody else comfortable.

What happened after was not my doing. It was Nick with his razor. It was Don and Shirley getting up from their table.

It was Harold and his bar tab money. It was Marlene in her brown coat with a wig catalog under her arm.

The red dress hung on the outside of my closet door through every single treatment.

I would see it first thing every morning, all through that long winter, on the hardest days and the good ones.

It is still there.