My daughter gave up her dream prom dress to help a girl who was crying behind the school vending machines. Instead, she wore her late father’s old suit. I thought the worst thing that could happen that evening was a few people laughing at her. But then the principal spotted the suit, dropped her drink, and called the police.
The kitchen window caught the fading evening sunlight, casting the same soft golden glow across the linoleum floor. From behind the curtain, I watched my daughter, almost afraid that if I looked away for too long, something might happen to her.
Norma sat at the kitchen table beside a shoebox filled with wrinkled bills, carefully flattening each one against the wooden surface.
Three years had passed since Joe’s heart had failed him, yet the empty chair across from her still seemed to belong to him.
“Two hundred and eighty dollars,” she announced, lifting her eyes toward me. “Mom, I’m only twenty dollars short.”
“Twenty dollars short of what, sweetheart?”
“My prom dress, Mom! The one in that beautiful champagne color. I told you about it.”
I wiped my hands dry and took the chair opposite her. The backs of her sneakers were peeling apart again, and the skin around her heels was raw and pink where her blisters had broken open.
“And Uncle Bob’s sister’s yard on Sunday!” she added.
That made me pause. Bob had been Joe’s friend from the motel night shift, a quiet man who had shown up at the funeral.
“She’s still paying you in cash?”
“She says she doesn’t trust banks. She hardly says a word to me, Mom. She just gives me the money and disappears back inside.”
“Norma, look at your feet.”
She spoke with the same quiet certainty Joe had always shown, as though she understood that the world didn’t owe anyone anything.
I gently brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Your father would be so proud of you.”
She smiled before lowering her gaze to the money again.
“Do you think Mrs. Clinton will come to the prom?”
“The principal? I imagine she will.”
“Last year, she started crying when they played the slow song. She just stood near the doorway. It was strange, Mom.”
“Sometimes, people carry sadness we can’t see, sweetheart,” I explained, thinking about Joe.
A week later, the dress hung inside a plastic garment cover on her closet door. Norma stood barefoot before the mirror, her face glowing as the champagne-colored fabric shimmered beneath the bedroom light.
“Mom,” she whispered.
“Do I look okay?”
“You look beautiful, baby.”
I raised my phone and snapped a picture. Behind her, the closet door stood partly open, revealing Joe’s old black suit hanging in its usual place, untouched for three years. The orange maple leaves stitched into its lapel caught the light and seemed to glow softly.
When Norma was ten, she used to run her fingers over those embroidered leaves, asking why they were orange instead of green.
“Because autumn was his favorite season,” I always told her.
There was something else I had never shared with her.
The night Joe brought that suit home, his friend Bob had been riding with him in the truck. The two of them remained in the driveway for nearly an hour before Joe finally came inside.
When I asked him what had happened, he simply replied, “Bob worries too much.”
Norma noticed my reflection in the mirror, her eyes following mine toward the suit as I stared at it without realizing.
“Mom? Is everything okay?”