Chapter 1: It’s Just for Photos
“It’s just for photos, sweetie,” Denise said, and slid the gravy boat toward me like a peace offering. “Brooke deserves it too.”
I set my fork down. Across the table, my half-sister didn’t look up from her phone.
“No,” I said.
It was the third time I’d said it since the pot roast came out. Dad’s sixty-third birthday, his dining room in Dayton, the good plates, a grocery-store cake that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY RICH because the girl at the bakery misheard. And Denise, in her red wrap blouse and the pearl earrings Dad bought her for their twentieth anniversary, asking for my mother’s wedding dress the way you’d ask for the salt.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “One afternoon. A friend of mine does these keepsake sessions. Brooke stands by a window, a few shots, done. You’d have it back by supper.”
“It’s been altered,” I said. “It was taken in for me. It won’t fit her.”
Brooke looked up then. She’s twenty-five, tall and broad-shouldered like Dad, with honey-blonde hair she’s been growing out since spring. We haven’t worn the same size since she was twelve, and that has never mattered to me once. It mattered to the dress. A seamstress named Mrs. Ochoa had spent four fittings on it. She’d let out nothing and taken in everything.
“So I won’t zip it all the way,” Brooke said. “God, Claire. It’s not like your mom’s gonna wear it.”
The room went very quiet. The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
Dad cleared his throat. “Brooke.”
That was it. Just her name, the way you’d say it to a dog that’s climbed on the couch.
My mother, Maggie, wore that dress in 1989 in a Methodist church in Kettering. Ivory lace, a high lace collar, forty-two covered buttons down the back. She kept it in a box under her bed for thirty years. Four years ago, in hospice, she held my wrist with what grip she had left and made me promise.
“Wear it,” she said. “And don’t let anybody talk you into anything else.”
I’d thought she meant a strapless gown from a bridal shop.
Denise reached across the table and patted my hand. Her nails were the same red as her blouse. “Your mother would have wanted to share. She was a generous woman. Everybody says so.”
“You never met my mother.”
“I know of her.”
Dad picked at the label on his beer bottle. “Honey,” he said, and I honestly didn’t know which of us he meant until he looked at me. “It’s one afternoon. Let her have a picture. Keep the peace.”
Keep the peace. He’d said it when I was nine and he moved into Denise’s townhouse. He’d said it when Brooke got my old bedroom at his place and my things went into a box in the garage. He’d said it at my college graduation, when Denise booked a dinner for the four of us and invited only the three of them.
I wished Marcus were here. He was working a night shift in the ER, and I wanted his knee against mine under the table.
“The answer is no,” I said. “Not for photos. Not for an afternoon. It stays in my closet until October fourteenth, and then it goes on me.”
Denise smiled. It was a beautiful smile, the kind she gives cashiers.
“Of course,” she said. “Your dress, your call.”
She said it so pleasantly that I almost believed her.
Brooke went back to her phone. Dad blew out his candles, all at once, like a man who was glad the evening had a way to end.
I left at nine. Denise walked me to the front door, which she had never done in twenty-five years, and stood under the porch light while I dug in my purse for my keys.
“Still keeping it in your spare room?” she asked. “The dress. Somewhere dry, I hope. Lace hates humidity.”
“It’s fine.”
“Good.” She jingled her own keys, absently, the way some people jingle change in a pocket.
I was halfway down the walk before it registered.
On her ring, between her Honda fob and a little enamel flamingo, hung a brass key with a blue rubber cap.
I’d put that blue cap on it myself. It was the spare to my house. I’d given it to Dad two years ago, for emergencies.
Dad had never once needed it.
