The Dress I Wore and the Seat I Kept

The dance

When we came back in, the band was between songs.

Ashley was waiting at the edge of the dance floor with Spencer, in her stocking feet, with a look on her face I last saw when she was ten and about to ask whether she could keep a stray.

“Mom,” she said. “I did something. I hope it’s all right.”

She nodded at the bandleader, and he nodded back. The drummer clicked his sticks. And the opening of “Could I Have This Dance” floated out over that tent, soft and slow and a little country, so far from anything on Camille’s playlist that two women at the center table actually looked at their programs.

It was the song Gordon and I danced to in the Lindell Grange hall in 1985. We had played it at his funeral. She had remembered.

“I cut the mother-daughter dance out of the schedule,” Ashley said. “Back in March. I told the planner it was too sentimental. I didn’t want to be looked at.” She wiped her face. “I called the band this afternoon from the bathroom. Will you dance with me?”

I looked at her. I looked at the girl I had held in a hospital bed in 1996, and in a grain cart in 2008, and by a grave in 2019, and I took her hand.

We danced. It was nothing fancy. The silk of her gown kept catching on my beige silk. But she put her head on my shoulder, and I could smell the shampoo, and somewhere in the second verse she whispered, “Daddy would have liked the dress.”

“He’d have said it was a lot of fabric.”

“He would have said it was a lot of fabric,” she said, and laughed, and cried, and we kept dancing.