The Pontoon Key on a Sparkler

The dress

The week after the Fourth, Paige called me at work. She never calls me at work.

“I need to ask you something,” she said, “and I don’t want you to feel like you have to.”

“Ask me.”

“Will you go with me to look at dresses? In Springfield? Saturday?”

I was standing behind my window with a stack of deposit slips in my hand, and I could not say anything for a second.

“What about your mother?” I said.

“Mom’s in Tulsa,” Paige said. “She’ll come for the wedding. She said to send her pictures. But I don’t want to send pictures to somebody. I want somebody there.”

She was quiet a second.

“I want you,” she said.

I had to put the phone against my shoulder and look up at the ceiling tiles for a minute. My coworker Donna, at the next window, slid a tissue across to me without asking why.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, honey. I’ll be there.”

We drove up to Springfield that Saturday in my car. It is about two hours from the lake, up through Camdenton and Buffalo, and Paige played the radio too loud the whole way like she was nineteen again.

The bridal shop was in a strip mall off Battlefield Road. A young woman named Amy brought us sweet tea in little plastic cups and asked Paige what she was looking for.

“Something I can get married in at a barn,” Paige said. “And then dance in. And then probably get onto a pontoon in.”

Amy laughed. I laughed. And then we started.

She tried on nine dresses. I sat on a little velvet bench with my purse in my lap and watched her come out from behind that curtain nine times.

Some were too much. One had a train that could have swept the whole Teague barn. One had so much beading she said she felt like a disco ball. We laughed until Amy had to sit down.

The seventh one was simple. Ivory, with little cap sleeves and a skirt that moved when she walked. No beading. No train. Just her.

She came out from behind the curtain and stood up on the little round platform in front of the three mirrors. And she did not look at the mirrors. She looked at me.

I did not say anything. I could not. I just put my hand over my mouth.

“That’s the one, isn’t it,” Paige said.

I nodded.

She stepped down off the platform in that dress and came over and knelt in front of my bench, right there on the carpet, and took both of my hands.

“Tammy,” she said, “you know you’re my mom, right? Not instead of my mom. I mean, also. You know that, don’t you?”

I had wanted a child so badly for so many years. I had stood in that cedar house after Jeff died and thought, well, that’s done, then. That door is closed.

And here was this girl in an ivory dress, kneeling on a bridal shop carpet, telling me the door had been open the whole time.

“I know it now,” I said. And then I cried so hard Amy brought the whole box of tissues.

We bought the dress. Paige paid for it herself out of her savings from the dental office, every dollar. She would not let me.

“You already gave me a boat,” she said. “You don’t get to give me a dress too. Let somebody else be generous for once.”