The Prom Dress Grandma Bought

Then she got quiet for a while, pinning. The kitchen smelled like hot hair and hairspray and the coffee going bitter on the burner.

Out the window the mist had stopped and the sun was trying to come through over the elevator at the edge of town.

“Your daddy,” Darla said, very softly, sliding a pin in behind Sadie’s ear.

“When he was about six, he used to sit on the floor of my shop under the dryer chairs and play with his trucks. He’d hand me bobby pins, one at a time, when I held out my hand.”

Sadie didn’t say anything. She kept her head straight, the way she’d been told, but I saw her eyes move to the side, toward her grandma’s voice.

“He was the best little helper,” Darla said. “Never dropped one. He’d hold them in his fist all afternoon so he’d be ready. And when I was done with a lady, he’d tell her she looked pretty. Every lady. Even old Mrs. Hansen, and she looked like a fence post.”

Sadie laughed, and Darla said, “Hold still,” and Sadie held still, and laughed anyway with her shoulders.

Then Darla said something that I don’t think was meant for me, but the kitchen is small, and I heard it.

“He’s a good man who’s ashamed of something,” she said.

“Ashamed men do dumb things. That’s not an excuse. It’s just the truth of them. I raised one, and I married one, and I loved them both.”

When she was done, she took the cape off with one snap and shook it out over the sink.

She handed Sadie the little mirror from her tackle box, and then she stood behind her, and the two of them looked at the back of Sadie’s head together in the window glass.

The curls fell down over one shoulder, loose and soft. The rest was swept up and pinned so well you couldn’t see a single pin.

Darla had tucked in a tiny gold barrette shaped like a leaf, and when Sadie touched it, Darla said it had been her own, from 1971.

“It went with the yellow dress,” Darla said. “It’ll go with the green one better. I always thought green was my color. I just never got to wear it to anything.”

Sadie turned around in the chair and put both arms around her grandma’s waist and pressed her face into that old red quilted jacket, and held on.

Darla put one hand on the back of her neck, very carefully, so as not to wreck the curls, and closed her eyes.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. I got up and went into the bathroom and ran the water so nobody would hear me, and I stood there with both hands on the sink until I could breathe right again.

Grand march at McCook Central is at six thirty in the gym. That is how it is in a lot of small towns out here.

Before the dance itself, the couples are announced one by one and walk across the gym floor while the whole town sits in the bleachers and takes pictures.

Darla and I got there at six. The gym smelled like floor wax and popcorn from the concession stand, which the junior class parents run to pay for the dance.

There were white paper streamers on the basketball hoops and an arch of balloons at one end of the floor.

We found seats about halfway up the bleachers, on the side by the scoreboard. Darla had brought a cushion for her hips.