The Whole Town Forgot My Sister Overnight, So I Made Them Look at Her novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Dress

At the bridal shop the dress refuses the goddaughter and Haley cuts the hem open to show the dime Callie sewed in, and Eugenia Rountree appears in the doorway knowing exactly what Haley is.

"Callie," I said into the dark. "Callie, I'm here."

The hand squeezed again, hard, the way she used to grab me on the Ferris wheel.

I held on with my eyes shut until 12:10.

Then it let go, and my fingers went numb and cold again.

I didn't sleep.

At seven I texted Jesse a single line: "She squeezed. Three times."

He wrote back in under a minute: "Then she's alive. So is he."

Callie's final fitting was Monday at four, at the bridal shop on Main.

I'd taken the afternoon off to go with her, back when I had a sister on paper.

I went anyway.

The shop had a pink awning and a bell over the door, and it smelled like steam and hairspray.

Miss Eugenia's goddaughter stood on the round platform in front of the three mirrors.

She was twenty-seven, five foot eight, with a blowout that cost more than my car payment.

Four bridesmaids sat on the white couch with champagne in plastic flutes.

They were her friends from the club, not Callie's friends from the diner.

The seamstress was on her knees with pins in her mouth.

She was past seventy and had made half the wedding dresses in Bell Shoals, including my mother's.

"Can I help you?" the goddaughter said to the mirror.

"I'm here for the fitting."

"Oh." She turned around. "You're the sister."

The bridesmaids looked at each other.

"Eugenia told me about you," she said. "You called the police about an imaginary sister. That's so sad."

One of the bridesmaids laughed into her champagne.

"Her name is Callie," I said. "That's her dress."

"Okay." The goddaughter smiled at the girls on the couch. "Somebody get her a water."

The seamstress took the pins out of her mouth and stood up slowly.

"Let's get you zipped, honey," she said to the goddaughter.

She pulled the zipper up the back of the dress.

It stopped four inches below the goddaughter's shoulder blades.

The seamstress tugged.

The goddaughter sucked in her breath, and the zipper didn't move.

"I don't understand it," the seamstress said. "I took these measurements myself."

She went to the counter and opened a spiral notebook.

I followed her and looked over her shoulder.

The page said "Rountree wedding, October 17."

The line for the bride's name was blank.

Under it, in the seamstress's tiny handwriting, it said "Height: 5 ft 3."

"How tall are you?" I asked the goddaughter.

"Five eight." She folded her arms. "Why?"

"Look at the hem," I said.

Everybody looked.

The skirt stopped a good three inches above her ankles, and her bare toes stuck out under it.

"It was cut for a girl five foot three," I said. "It was cut for my sister."

"This is insane," the goddaughter said to the seamstress. "Fix it."

The seamstress didn't move.

She was looking at the dress with her mouth a little open.

"There's a dime in the hem," I said. "Left side, near the seam. It was our grandmother's lucky dime, from 1964."

I could hear the steamer hissing in the back room.

"Callie sewed it in herself at the first fitting," I said.

"She stuck her thumb with the needle and cried, and you gave her a peppermint."

The seamstress put her hand on the counter.

"I keep peppermints for the brides who cry," she said quietly.

"Get this off me," the goddaughter said.

Nobody helped her.

The seamstress picked up her little gold scissors and knelt down at the hem.

She found the spot by feel, on the left side by the seam.

She snipped six stitches.

A dime fell out onto the white carpet.

I picked it up and held it out on my palm so the whole room could see it.

It was a silver dime, worn thin, dated 1964.

One of the bridesmaids set her champagne down on the floor.

"I sewed that dime back in myself," the seamstress said. "After her thumb quit bleeding. For a little girl who cried."

She looked up at me with her eyes wet.

"I remember the dime," she said. "I can't see her face."

The goddaughter tore at the zipper with both hands.

"Somebody get this thing off me!"

Two bridesmaids finally got up and helped her.

She stepped out of my sister's dress and left it on the platform in a heap.

She walked out of the shop in her slip and her jeans, with her shoes in her hand.

The bell rang over the door behind her.

The four bridesmaids looked at me, then at each other, then at their phones.

By supper it would be all over Bell Shoals.

It wouldn't be that Haley Coker had lost her mind.

It would be that something was wrong with the Rountree wedding.

The seamstress lifted the dress off the platform and smoothed the skirt over her arm.

"Whoever she is," she said, "this is hers. I'll keep it."

"Thank you."

I closed my hand around the dime.

My left hand, the cold one, felt nothing at all.

The bell rang again.

I turned around, and Miss Eugenia Rountree was standing in the doorway in a camel cardigan and pearls.

She looked at the dress over the seamstress's arm.

Then she looked at my left hand.

"Only your hand, Haley," she said softly. "How lucky for you."

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