a dress too small for him

The bookstore was closing for good that Friday, and I had talked myself into stopping by mostly because I didn't know what else to do with an evening anymore. I was forty-five, single, a librarian at the county branch, which meant my whole life was already books, and here I was volunteering for more of them. Still, the place had been part of the town since before the base expanded, and it seemed wrong to let it die without at least walking through it one last time.

The owner had died in the spring, and his nephew had spent four months trying to sell the inventory before giving up and donating it. What was left wasn't much. Half the shelves stood empty, and the rest were piled with the sort of stock nobody had wanted at half price either. A single lamp near the register was on. The rest of the light came from the window, and outside the window the sky was doing that early winter thing where it gets dark at five and stays that way.

I heard a noise in the back before I saw anyone. Then a woman backed out from behind a shelf of paperbacks, arms full of a cardboard box, and nearly took me out at the knees.

"Oh! Sorry, sorry, I didn't hear the door." She shifted the box onto her hip and looked at me. "You're not here to buy anything, are you. Nobody's here to buy anything."

"I'm here to mourn, mostly," I said.

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and introduced herself as Adaeze. She was thirty-three, she told me later, and she worked nights at the pharmacy out by the highway, and she had known the old owner because he'd come in every week with a list of mysteries for his wife. Tonight she was supposed to be sorting the last of the donation boxes, and instead she was sitting on a milk crate reading them.

"I'm Declan," I said. "I work at the library. I think we've met, maybe, at some thing."

"Maybe. You have a library face."

I wasn't sure what a library face was, but I had a feeling I was wearing it. She went back to her box and I went back to the shelves, and for a while the only sounds were her flipping pages and me sliding books sideways to read spines. The store was warm in a dusty way, and it smelled like old paper and the space heater she'd brought from her car. It was, I had to admit, nicer than my apartment. Another night alone in my apartment had been the alternative, so the bar was on the floor.

The trouble with my life, I had decided somewhere around my forty-fifth birthday, was that nothing in it ever surprised me anymore. I'd dated a woman named Karen for two years in my late thirties. It ended the way a kettle ends, a click and then quiet, no hard feelings on either side, and since then there had been nobody. I wasn't unhappy exactly. I was just running the same week over and over with different dates on the calendar.

"Okay, stop," Adaeze said. "Put down the Western and come look at this."

I came over. She was kneeling in front of a box marked FREE in marker that had faded to almost nothing, and she was holding up a dress. It was a real dress, a floral one, yellow flowers on a green background, some kind of polyester from a decade I couldn't have named with confidence. It had shoulder pads like small loaves of bread.

"Somebody donated this thinking it was going to a good home," she said. "It deserves one last night out before the dumpster."

"That's a size eight at most," I said.

"I know." She grinned at me, and it was a sharp grin, the kind that meant she'd been waiting for a target. "I dare you to try it on."

I should have said no. A sensible man says no. But she was clearly bored out of her mind, and I was clearly nothing to look at on a Friday night, and the way she said it carried a challenge, like she was daring the whole store and I just happened to be in it.

"There's a changing room," she said, pointing with the dress. "Sort of. It's the back room. There's a mirror and a dead plant."

"It won't fit."

"That's the point, Declan. That's the entire point."

So I took the dress. I want to note here that Adaeze was thirty-three and I was forty-five and neither of us was pretending this was anything yet. It was a dare in a dying bookstore. That's all it was at that moment, and I held onto that thought while I walked to the back room, which was about eight feet of clutter with a mirror propped against the wall between a box of National Geographics and the dead plant, which was not dead, actually, it was plastic, which was somehow worse.

The dress went on over my clothes because there was no way it was going over anything less. The zipper only came halfway up my back. The shoulder pads sat on my shoulders like they were afraid of them. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked ridiculous, and I also looked, and this was the strange part, like I was at a costume party for the first time since college. My face was doing something I didn't recognize. I think it was grinning.

I walked back out.

Adaeze took one look at me and made a noise like a teakettle starting, and then she was gone, bent over the register counter, laughing into her sleeve. I stood there in the lamplight with my arms out a little, doing a slow turn, which made it worse, which was the point of doing it.

"The shoulder pads," she managed. "The shoulder pads are load bearing." She got up, wiped her eyes, and then stopped laughing, and looked at me the way you look at a book you picked up for the cover and then read the first line of. "You actually did it. Nobody does it."

"I have nothing to lose," I said. "I'm wearing a floral dress in a closed bookstore on a Friday."

"Right." Something shifted in her face. She was quiet a second, folding