The Prom Dress Grandma Bought

“Does Dad know?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Grandma just wants to take you shopping. That’s all this is.”

Sadie nodded slowly, but I could see her turning it over, the way she turns everything over, looking for the place where somebody might get hurt.

Darla’s Buick pulled into our driveway at 7:52 that Saturday, eight minutes early, because Darla has been eight minutes early for everything since 1971.

She honked once, short and polite, and Sadie ran out in her coat without zipping it.

It is about forty minutes from Salem to Sioux Falls on the interstate, past Montrose and Hartford, past the feedlots and the long brown fields still waiting on spring.

Darla drove with both hands on the wheel at exactly the speed limit and talked the whole way.

She talked about her own prom in 1971, at the old high school in Howard, and the dress her mother sewed out of a pattern from the Ben Franklin store.

It was pale yellow with a little bolero jacket, and she said she thought she looked like a stick of butter.

“Your grandpa Harold told me I looked like a daffodil,” she said. “He was lying, but it was the right lie. That’s when I knew I’d marry him.”

Sadie laughed in the back seat, really laughed, for the first time all week.

When we stopped for gas in Hartford, I got out to pay and Darla rolled down her window and told me to put my wallet away.

I tried to argue, and she gave me the look she used to give customers who wanted bangs they couldn’t handle.

The shop was on the south side of Sioux Falls.

Inside, it was all racks of gowns in every color you could think of, and bright daylight pouring in through the big front window onto the carpet.

A woman named Pam met us at the door. She was about my age, and she asked Sadie what she was thinking, and Sadie said she didn’t know, and Pam said that was the best answer anyone had given her all day.

Sadie tried on six dresses. A navy one with sequins. A pink one that made her look twelve. A black one that made Darla say, “Absolutely not, you’re seventeen, not a widow.”

A lavender one with a slit that Sadie came out of the fitting room already shaking her head about.

What I noticed, and what Darla noticed too, was that Sadie checked every price tag before she ever looked in the mirror.

She would come out of the dressing room with her hand already on the tag, turning it over, and her face would close up like a fist.

After the sixth one, Darla stood up from her chair, walked over to the rack Pam had pulled, and one by one tore the price tags off every hanger and dropped them into her purse.

Pam opened her mouth, then closed it again and smiled.

“Grandma picks the numbers today,” Darla said, snapping her purse shut. “You pick the dress. That’s the deal, and I’m seventy-two years old, so I don’t renegotiate.”

The seventh dress was emerald green. It was simple, no beads, no sequins, just a long skirt that moved when she walked and a neckline that sat right on her collarbones. Pam had pulled it almost as an afterthought.

Sadie came out of the fitting room slowly. She didn’t reach for a tag, because there wasn’t one.