Chapter 6: Open

Whoever he called, the next morning a locksmith was standing at my mother's shop door.

He had a toolbox and a small envelope.

Inside were two new keys and a note in square hard print.

Ground floor. Second floor. One dollar received.

The locksmith changed both locks while I watched.

He didn't touch the stairs to the top floor.

Neither did I.

It took me eleven days to open.

I scraped the soap off the window with a razor blade, one strip at a time, while Annette held the ladder and narrated.

"There's a G. There's an i. Oh my God, it's your name, it's like an archaeology show."

Her fiancé came by after his shift with a shop vac and took six years of dust out of the carpet.

He hugged me at the door with one arm and said, "About time," and left.

I put a cot in the storage room on the second floor, between the garment boxes and my mother's old cutting table.

It wasn't the apartment.

It was mine.

At night I could hear Gabriella's heels on my walnut floors right over my head.

I put a pillow over my face and slept anyway.

My mother's dress form went back in the window, where it had always stood.

It was older than I was, with a cloth body worn smooth at the shoulders from her hands.

I dressed it in a cathedral veil I'd been restoring for a year, Belgian lace with the netting rewoven by hand.

My wedding gown stayed in its box against the storage room wall.

I wasn't ready to look at it.

On a Saturday in November I turned the sign to OPEN.

By ten o'clock I had my first gown.

The lady with the soup cans brought her granddaughter in.

The granddaughter was twenty-four and a nurse, with her mother's gown in a dry-cleaning bag from 1994.

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