had to find out what my father did to my sister, and what I did about it.” He sat down on the old lawn chair beside the burn barrel, a handful of curling photographs still in his fingers, and for the first time in forty four years he looked every one of his sixty eight years. I took the pictures out of his hand and held it instead. The smoke drifted over the garden. “Dennis,” I said, “whatever this is, you have carried it long enough. Tell me. I will not leave.”
“The woman in the green dress is not Patricia,” he said. “Her name is Colleen Bennett. She is my sister, three years older than me.” I stared at him. Dennis had never mentioned a sister. He took a long breath. In 1979, his father, Harlan Bennett, had been furious that Colleen married a quiet mechanic from Georgia named Ray Dray. Harlan announced to the whole congregation at Cedar Fork Church that his daughter was lost to the family forever, and the church held a memorial service for her. Arthur, a boy of seventeen, had sat in the third pew.
I felt the garden spin a little. “You mean she was alive the whole time,” I said. Dennis nodded. “Alive, married, and living in Savannah. My father forbade anyone to speak her name. I was a teenager, and I obeyed for three years. But the night before our wedding, I could not stand it anymore.” Suddenly I remembered that night in 1982. Dennis had vanished from the rehearsal dinner for four hours and come back with mud on his shoes and a look on his face I had never been able to name.
A wife learns that the woman in the green dress was the sister of her husband and the family lie finally ends with a long reunion.
“I drove to the bus depot in Lexington,” Dennis said. “I had written to Colleen secretly, and she took a bus for eleven hours because I begged her to see me marry. I hid her in a motel, and the next morning she stood beside you in a green dress that her husband had saved up to buy. But my father was in the hospital in Louisville after his stroke, and I was afraid the church gossip would reach him and make him worse. So I told you she was your cousin Patricia from Dayton. It was the only lie I ever told you.”
Suddenly I could see her clearly, the woman in the green dress, who had danced only once, with Dennis, and slipped away before the cake. She had pressed a small envelope into my hand beside the church door and whispered something I did not catch. Inside was a silver thimble and a note that read, For the bride, from someone who wishes you forty good years. I had kept it for decades in my jewelry box, thinking it was a gift from a kind cousin. I went inside, fetched it, and set it in the palm of Dennis. He closed his fingers around it and wept.
“Why did you never tell me after he passed away?” I asked gently. Dennis rubbed his eyes. “Because Colleen asked me not to. Our father never forgave her, not even at the end. She told me, Dennis, let the past stay quiet, I have made my peace in Beaufort. She did not want a new family to reopen the wound. I wrote to her every Christmas and I sent your photographs. I only burned them tonight because I thought Arthur would tell the whole county and I would break my promise to her.”
I will tell you what I felt, and it was not anger. It was a deep, tender sadness for a girl who had been erased from her own family, and love for a husband who had spent forty four years guarding her one small peace. I stood up, brushed the ash from my skirt, and said, “Dennis Bennett, go and get your address book.” He stared at me. “Colleen is seventy one years old,” I said. “She has been waiting long enough for her brother to bring his wife to meet her.” I thought of the lonely birthdays she must have spent, and the Christmas cards that never once asked for anything.
We called that very night. A warm, slow voice answered, and when Dennis said his name, there was a silence so long I thought the line had dropped. Then she began to laugh and cry together, saying his name three times. She said she had a spare room and a porch with two rocking chairs, in a cottage by the water at Sable Point. I took the telephone. “Colleen, this is Joanne,” I said. “I have been your sister for forty four years, and nobody told me. I would like to start now.” Dennis sat down on the kitchen floor with the phone against his ear, like a boy of seventeen again.
We left on Thursday and drove for two days, through Tennessee, through Georgia, past the long green marshes of South Carolina. Dennis hardly spoke, but he held my hand across the seat the whole way. Along the road I called Arthur and told him everything, and he wept on the line and apologized for the scene in my living room. I told him there was nothing to forgive. If he had not recognized that dress, we might never have gone, and the truth would have stayed in the smoke. The radio played songs from 1982, and twice Dennis laughed at himself for knowing every word.
Colleen was waiting at the end of a shell driveway, small and silver haired, in a faded green sweater. She and Dennis stood a few feet apart, two old people with their father jaw, and neither could move. I walked forward and took her hands first, so he would not have to be brave alone. “You must be the bride,” she said, and her eyes shone. Behind her, the tide moved softly through the reeds, as if the whole shore had held its breath. Forty four years late, I finally hugged the woman in the green dress, and she smelled exactly like the lilacs in my wedding bouquet.
