Part 3 — The Fitting Room
Heather folded her arms, and the whole yard waited for Craig. He stood by the cake table with his hands open at his sides, a man of forty-nine in a nice shirt, looking as though he had been caught in a photograph he had hoped nobody would develop. Madison was still holding the paper from the hem of my mother.
“Go on,” Heather said. “You wanted me to wear it, so tell her what you were going to ask me.” Craig looked at the grass. “I was going to ask Heather to marry me again,” he said. “At the graduation. In front of everybody. I was going to ask her in that dress, and then I was going to tell you, Jo, after.”
No one made a sound. Even the children stopped chewing. I felt something I had not expected, which was not heartbreak but an odd, cold clarity, like stepping out of a hot room into snow. A man does not have a dress taken in at the waist for his ex-wife unless he has been thinking about it for a long time.
He had made the plan in the winter. He had taken the dress out of my closet on the first of March while I worked a double at the clinic. He had driven it to a tailor in town, and on the third of March he had stood in a fitting room while Heather, in my dress, was pinned and measured. The tailor wrote the name of the customer on a white tag. H. Lund. Heather Lund.
Heather spoke, and her voice was flat. “He told me you two were finished. He told me you were sleeping in separate rooms and that you had agreed to it. He asked me to try the dress for a photograph for our daughter. I am not proud that I said yes.” She turned to me. “I found out the truth this morning, when Madison told me you were still in the house.”
Madison took a step toward me. Her face was blotchy and furious and young. “Dad, you let me say that was the dress of Mom. You let me say it on the internet. You told me Jo would not notice.” Craig said her name, and she held up a hand, exactly the way I do in a classroom.
I asked everyone to give me a moment, and I walked into the house. In the hall closet, on the shelf where I keep my tax papers, was the folder I had prepared on Sunday night. A friend at the clinic had told me about a lawyer in Plymouth named Mr. Okafor. I had met with him once. He had listened without writing anything for twenty minutes and then said, calmly, “Joanna, property you bring into a marriage, and property that was given to you by your mother, stays yours.”
I came back outside with the folder. I did not read from it. I told the family only what mattered: that the dress was mine, the work of my mother, and that nobody had the right to borrow or alter it without my permission, and that I had asked Mr. Okafor to prepare an agreement of legal separation, which Craig would sign on Monday or answer to a judge about. I said it kindly. Kind is not the same as weak.
Craig did not argue. He took the folder in both hands as though it weighed ten pounds. He said he was sorry in front of everyone, to me, to Madison, to his mother. Heather said she would take her daughter for the weekend, and added, to my surprise, “Jo, I would like to apologize to you properly sometime. Not here.” I told her I would like that.
A pinch of love sewn into a hem outlasts every plan made to unpick it.
That night Madison came to my room, still in the dress. She stood in the doorway, small and ashamed, with the grass stains on the train and three buttons gone. She asked if she could help me fix it. I said yes. We sat on the floor with the sewing tin of my mother between us and a needle and a spool of ivory thread.
We worked until the sun came up. I showed her how to sew a button so it holds through a lifetime, how to make a stitch invisible. She cried over the hem and I cried too, and neither of us said much. When the last of the forty-two buttons was in place, she laid her cheek against the satin and said, “She really loved you, Jo. Your mom.” “She did,” I said. “And she loved you too, though she never met you. That is what the hem was for.”
In the fall I wrapped the little linen pouch in tissue and put it back inside the hem, and I tucked in a new slip of paper beside the old one. On it I wrote, in my own hand, a line for whoever wears the dress next. The ink is blue, and the stitches are small, and nobody will open it for a long time.