Chapter 2 - The Girl in Street Clothes
The door opened and Dana stepped in, standing across from me in regular clothes — jeans and a cream blouse I'd seen a hundred times.
Her pale blue bridesmaid dress was crushed against her chest, the hanger bent under her fingers.
She wouldn't meet my eyes.
"Dana?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "Why aren't you dressed?"
She shut the door behind her, quietly, like she was closing a lid on something she couldn't carry anymore.
"Please," she said. "Please don't make me put this on."
"I tried," she said. "I had it on, I stood in front of the mirror, and I couldn't do it."
My fingers closed around the bouquet stems until the wire bit through the ribbon.
"What changed, Dana?"
She glanced back at the door. Downstairs somebody laughed, bright and high, and it sounded like it was coming from another life.
"I can't stand up there next to you knowing what I know. There was a man with Gregory last night, out behind the venue by the parking lot."
I set the bouquet down slowly, because my hands had started shaking and I didn't want her to see.
"A man?"
"I couldn't see his face at first. But I heard plenty. I was coming back from my car and I heard voices around the corner, near the dumpsters." She swallowed. "I knew the voice before I knew the face. It stopped me dead."
"Whose voice?"
Dana looked at the door again, like she was afraid of being overheard, though Gregory was surely down near the altar by now.
She shook her head.
"Let me tell you what he was saying first. Please. I need you to hear this part."
I sat down on the vanity bench because my knees had stopped feeling like mine.
"Okay."
"Gregory was talking about your dad's insurance settlement," she said carefully, the way you talk around something that might shatter. "And the house. The one that's in your name."
"He knows about all of that. I told him myself."
"He said he only had to hold steady for a year. Then he could 'restructure everything jointly.' That was his word. Restructure."
The word dropped into me like a stone into still water. I felt the rings spread out to my ribs.
"That could mean anything, Dana."
"He laughed." Her voice cracked on it. "He laughed and said you were lonely enough that you wouldn't look too close."
I don't remember the sound I made. I remember how it tasted. Salt, and something like metal, like I'd bitten my tongue.
"Say that again."
"I won't. I'm not saying it twice. Once was hard enough, and I know you heard me."
I looked at myself in the mirror. Half laced. The back of the dress hanging open where Hannah had run out to check the flowers before she finished tying it. My mascara was already gone.
"Twenty years," I whispered. "I slept with a chair under the doorknob for two of them, Dana. You know that."
"I know."
"He takes such good care of me."
"I know."
"Then why would he say something like that?"
Dana crossed the room and knelt down in front of the bench. She lifted the bouquet out of my lap and set it aside.
"Because some men learn exactly what a woman needs and then feed it to her one spoon at a time, until she's full enough that she stops checking the price."
I stared at her. Almost thirty years of Dana being right about the things I didn't want her right about.
"You didn't have to do this today."
"Yes, I did. If I let you put your name next to his, I'd never forgive myself."
Downstairs, the string quartet had started tuning. I could hear Hannah's voice, warm and host-bright, telling somebody the ceremony was running a few minutes behind.
I looked back at the half-laced dress in the mirror.
"I need to hear it from him," I said. "Before I do anything, I need it from Gregory's own mouth."
A knock. Dana opened the door. It was Hannah.
"Mom, what's the holdup?" She looked confused.
I pulled her aside, the unfinished dress dragging behind me.
May you like
"I need ten minutes," I whispered. "Stall them. Tell them I broke a strap. Anything."
She studied my face, then nodded without one question. That alone told me she'd already been wondering.
