Chapter 16: The Dress

The dress came to my mother's hospital room on Friday afternoon, in a white box with a gold ribbon.

A courier in a Hollin Hotels blazer waited at the door until I signed for it.

Janet lifted the lid with one finger.

Inside, folded in tissue, lay a gray cotton dress with a white collar and a white apron, and a name stitched over the pocket in blue thread: T. Lind.

Nobody said anything.

It was the uniform I had worn every summer from fourteen to nineteen, cut for a girl my size, and it smelled of starch.

"Well," said Janet. "She kept the pattern."

"Seven years," said the pianist, from the foot of the bed. "She kept the pattern for seven years."

All six of them had come to see me off, and the room had never held so many men in suits.

The surgeon sat on the window seat, checking my mother's chart for the third time.

The driver held a rented tuxedo jacket on a hanger and read the tag.

Anthony stood by the door with his hands in his pockets.

"She wants you in the apron," the architect said. "In front of two hundred people. She wants them to see the maid and then hear what the maid says."

I held the dress up by the shoulders.

The collar was the same stiff white.

For one second I could smell the gatehouse kitchen, with the soap and the coffee and my mother humming.

"Put it down, Tess," Janet said.

"I'm deciding."

"No, you aren't. I've watched you put on that dress for five summers and you never once looked at the mirror. Don't give her the mirror."

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