[Part 1 ]The Dress My mother was diagnosed when I was fifteen.She was a seamstress in the specific way of someone who has done it long enough that the skill becomes part of how she thought she saw fabric in terms of what it could become.
She decided to make me a prom dress.Not because prom was imminent. I was fifteen. Prom was three years away.She made it because she was running out of time and she wanted to make something that would still be there when she wasn’t.
She chose the design carefully.
A deep blue that she said matched my eyes exactly.
Beading on the bodice that she placed by hand, one small bead at a time, during the hours when she had enough energy to sit up and work.
She died before she could finish it.
Her seamstress friend Helen knew the project.
My mother had left detailed notes.
Helen finished it from those notes over the following month.
She brought it to me without ceremony.
She just said: your mother wanted you to have this.
I put it in the back of my closet in a garment bag.
I wasn’t ready.
I waited two years.
When prom came around I knew.
My stepmother Diane had been in our house for three years.
She had asked once to see the dress.
I had shown her because refusing seemed unkind.
She had admired the beading.
She had asked where my mother got the fabric.
I had told her.
On prom night I came downstairs in my mother’s dress.
Diane was in the living room.
She was wearing a version of it.
Not identical.
Close enough to be unmistakable.
The silhouette. The color. The placement of the decorative elements at the bodice.
She smiled.
She said: what a coincidence. We have similar taste.
My father looked at the floor.
Part 2 — Marcus
My date Marcus had been my friend since seventh grade.
He knocked on the door thirty seconds after I came downstairs.
He came in wearing his tuxedo with the specific ease of someone who is comfortable in formal clothes because he treats them like any other clothes.
