Because inside, tucked where the perfume should’ve been, Ray had hidden a glass vial about the size of my thumb, wrapped in a strip of chamois, with a cork in it.
He’d emptied that drugstore bottle and rinsed it and filled it back up with something else.
I knew what it was before I got the cork out. You do not forget a smell you wore at nineteen years old.
Coty Emeraude. They quit making it the way it used to be sometime in the nineties and I have complained about that at every drugstore counter in Tulsa for thirty years, and Ray has stood beside me for every one of those complaints looking at his shoes.
The receipt was folded around the vial. A collector in Ohio. Sealed vintage bottle, 1968 formulation, a hundred and eighty-five dollars, plus shipping, plus a note from the seller telling him how to keep it out of the light.
A hundred and eighty-five dollars. That man would not buy himself a shirt that wasn’t on a clearance rack.
He put it in a six-dollar Walgreens bottle because he wanted me to open the wrapping and be let down, and then smell it, and figure it out with my own nose. He’d have stood there with that grin he had, the one that made you want to throw something at him.
I never opened it. I was so hurt I set it on the shelf and left it there, and he never said a word, and I have to live with knowing he waited three weeks for me to notice and then died in the driveway hosing off his truck.
Tied to the cork with fishing line, on a paper tag no bigger than a stamp:
“Smells like the Saturday I met you. Wear it Friday and I’ll take you dancing at the VFW like an old fool.”
Friday was our anniversary supper. He’d already made the reservation. It was on the calendar in the kitchen in his chicken-scratch and I had looked right past it.
I wore it in October. I sat in my own bedroom and put it on my wrists and my throat, and I was nineteen years old for about four seconds, and then I was fifty-six and alone in a house that was too quiet.
The reel is in the hall closet in the box. My nephew fishes and I cannot make myself hand it over yet.
I go to the VFW on Fridays now. Not to dance. There’s a woman there named Louetta who lost hers in 2019 and we sit at the same table and don’t talk much.
She asked me last month what perfume I had on.
I told her the whole thing. First time out loud.