Part 3 — Size Eight Ivory
“Her name is Marcy Tillman,” Debbie said through the phone. “Size eight, ivory, with a sweetheart neckline. The ceremony date she gave us is June twentieth. She was in on Tuesday for the final fitting.” Nobody at the shower moved. A spoon of chicken salad sat halfway to the mouth of an aunt.
I knew the name. Marcy Tillman worked in the office of Glenn, and she had been to our house for the Christmas party, in a green dress, with a casserole. I had thanked her for the casserole. I had asked about her mother. For a moment I could not find the floor with my feet, and then I remembered that I had been standing on solid ground for twenty-six years, because I keep books.
Glenn said it was a misunderstanding. He said Marcy was a friend, a client, a woman he was helping out. His mother put down her plate and said, in a voice I had last heard when he was fourteen, “Glenn. A man does not buy a wedding dress for a friend.” Forty women in sundresses stared at the floor, the ceiling, the pink tablecloth, anywhere but at us.
Hannah ended the call. She had not let go of my hand since it began. “Mama,” she said, “is my dress still mine?” I told her what I had been waiting three months to say. “Your dress is yours, sweetheart. I put down the deposit in April from my own paycheck, from the account at the credit union that your father never knew about. Debbie called because your father tried to charge the balance. I will pay it myself on Saturday, and you will pick it up just as you planned.”
Then I opened my purse and took out the second envelope, the thick one from the glove box. “While we are telling the truth,” I said, “let me tell the rest.” In it were six months of copies. The statement of the closed account. The new account in his name. The hotel charges in Savannah in March. The deposit to a venue in Rome for June twentieth. All of it on the card of Glenn, and all of it paid out of the money that was ours.
I had not done this alone. In February, after the grocery store, I had gone to a lawyer in Rome, a woman named Mrs. Haskins, whose office is above the pharmacy. She told me that in Georgia, money saved during a marriage belongs to both spouses, and that moving it into one name to take control of it is a thing a court will look at very closely. She told me to keep every page and say nothing.
On the Monday before the shower, Mrs. Haskins had filed. The court had signed an order that morning, which I had in the envelope under the photocopies. Glenn was barred from moving, spending, or hiding anything further in the accounts, and he was required to give a full account of where the money went, under oath. A hearing was set for the first of June, three weeks before the date on the dress of Marcy.
Glenn looked at the paper for a long time. I watched him decide to be sorry. He said it had never been supposed to come out this way. He said he had made mistakes. I said that a mistake is a thing you make once, and that this had been planned, with deposits and fittings and a date. I did not raise my voice. I have never needed to.
His mother stood up from her chair. She crossed the room and took my face in her two hands, which she has never once done in thirty-two years. “Paula,” she said, “I raised him wrong in one thing. I let him think a smile could cover anything.” Then she turned to her son and said that his sister would drive him home, and that he would not be welcome at her house again until he had told the truth to every person in that room, one by one.
A bookkeeper knows that a lie is only a number that has not yet been checked against the record.
Glenn left through the kitchen. Nobody watched him go. The forty women found their forks again. Someone put on the music. Hannah put her head on my shoulder, and the aunt who had been holding the chicken salad finally took her bite, and the shower, strangely, became a happy one.
The hearing in June was short. The judge reviewed the statements, which were clean and numbered, and ordered Glenn to restore the savings to the joint account from his share of the retirement, under a payment plan supervised by the court. The dress of Marcy Tillman was canceled. The date she had given the venue was released. Glenn did not marry anyone that summer.
In July, in the small white church where I was married, I stood at the back with my arms around myself and watched my daughter walk down the aisle in the dress I had saved for since the day she was born. She stopped halfway, turned, and found my face. She mouthed three words, and I mouthed them back.
