Love After Layoffs novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Coat Check

The Ketterman Foundation gala was held in the ballroom of the Allegheny Hotel, the same hotel with the marble lobby and the brass planters.

I stopped on the steps outside and looked at the revolving door.

"Don't," Yvonne said, tucking her arm through mine. "Don't you dare turn back."

She wore a red satin gown and a fur stole from the nineteen-eighties.

Her gray bob had been set that morning at a salon she called an emergency.

I wore my mother's green dress.

It was velvet, long-sleeved, with a low back, and she had worn it to my grandmother's sixtieth birthday and never again.

I'd had it taken in an inch by a tailor on Murray Avenue who cried when I told him whose it was.

"You look like a queen," Yvonne said.

"I look like a woman who's about to see her husband in a tuxedo."

"Same thing."

Inside, the lobby was full of people in black and gold.

A string quartet played somewhere out of sight, and waiters moved through the crowd with silver trays.

I saw faces from the vendor town hall, and every one of them smiled at me.

A woman I'd never met squeezed my arm and whispered, "Good for you."

I could hardly breathe.

The coat check was a long counter off the lobby, run by two attendants in white gloves.

"I'll find a drink," Yvonne said. "Come find me before you faint."

I stood in line behind a couple arguing about parking.

When I reached the counter, I handed over my black wrap and took a numbered ticket.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Love After Layoffs from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.