Rehearsal Required

Connor came in the back door at six fifteen and dropped his keys in the bowl by the mudroom hook, the same way he did every night, except tonight he let the keys bounce out of the bowl and land on the floor and didn't pick them up.

The rehearsal had been a mess from the first minute. The new marionette for the wizard had a tangled shoulder string, the one he'd spent three evenings on, and Dennis, the retired mailman who ran the wolf puppet, had stepped on his own lines twice and knocked the cardboard tree flat. Then the gallery's event coordinator called halfway through to say the show date might move a week, which meant everything they'd rehearsed might not even matter. Connor had stood there with string wound around his fingers, and thought, this is the stupidest thing I have ever volunteered for.

He was twenty-eight years old and he ran a small gallery and he had volunteered to direct a puppet show for a retired schoolteacher, and now he was standing in his own mudroom staring at his dropped keys like they'd personally insulted him.

"Rough one?" Lia called from the kitchen.

"Yeah." He came in and leaned on the counter. She was in her work shirt still, HVAC logo on the chest, cutting an onion with her sleeves pushed up. Twenty-seven years old, three years married, and she still had the same short haircut she'd had the night they met at a gallery opening, his gallery, back when he was too nervous to talk to anyone at his own event.

"Tell me."

"Everything," he said. "The wizard puppet's shoulder string snapped. The wolf ate it. The gallery's event coordinator called and the date might move. The whole thing's a joke."

"Okay, so the date might move. That's actually good, that buys you time to fix the string."

"I guess."

"And Dennis is sixty-one, Connor. He knocked over a cardboard tree. The world survived."

"I know. I know it doesn't matter. It's just that I said yes to this thing and now I'm in charge of it and everything I touch falls apart."

Lia put the knife down and wiped her hands on a towel and looked at him the way she did, head tilted, patient, like she was waiting for him to finish a thought he hadn't started yet.

"You need a break," she said. "Not a talk. A break. Finish your dinner and then come upstairs, I got something."

"Something?"

"A game. Maybe. If you're up for it."

Dinner was leftover chili and cornbread, and Connor ate it without really tasting it, and Lia told him about a furnace she'd fixed in a house where the owner had forty ceramic frogs on every windowsill, and by the end of it Connor's shoulders had come down about an inch. That defined her. She always knew when to stop asking about his day and start telling him about hers.

* * *

The workshop used to be a garage. Connor had converted it two years back, and now it held two workbenches, a wall of tools, half-finished marionettes hanging from a dowel rod like laundry, spools of colored string sorted by size, and a cracked snow globe that Lia had claimed as a paperweight on the first day and refused to give back. It was the room where he fixed things, which was maybe why he'd avoided it all evening.

Lia led him in there anyway, flicked on the overhead light, and went straight to the old steamer trunk in the corner. They'd bought the trunk at an estate sale the previous spring, mostly because it was cheap and mostly because the old man selling it told them a half hour of stories about his mother's community theater days. It had sat in the corner since then, full of old costume pieces Lia kept meaning to sort through.

She dug around in it, muttered something, and came out holding a hanger with a garment bag over it.

"So," she said. "I went through the trunk last weekend while you were at the gallery. There's some real junk in there, but also this."

She pulled the bag off. It was a dress, short-sleeved, dark green with little white flowers printed all over it, a collar, buttons down the front. It looked like something out of an old photograph, the kind of dress a woman wore to a church picnic in 1955.

"This is actually nice," Connor said, reaching for it.

Lia held it out of reach. "Uh uh. It's not for me." She grinned, and Connor recognized that grin, the one she got when a furnace job turned out to be easy money or when she beat him at cards. "It's for you."

"For me."

"You heard me."

Connor stood there with his hands in his pockets. "Lia, I'm not wearing a dress."

"I didn't say you are. I said it's for you. It's a dare. You can say no and I'll never bring it up again and we'll go watch TV." She held it out toward him. "But it's your size, I checked. And it'd be funny. And honestly? You've had a garbage day and I think it'd fix you."

He looked at the dress. It was a nice dress, honestly. The green would probably look fine on him. He was not a small guy, twenty-eight and kind of wiry, but the cut of it looked forgiving.

"It'd fix me," he repeated.

"Maybe. Or it'd be dumb and we'd laugh for ten minutes and that also fixes you."

Connor had thought about this kind of thing before, if he was being honest with himself, which he mostly tried not to be. Not a whole lot, just in passing, the way a guy thinks about a lot of stuff in passing. He'd never said it out loud to anybody, including Lia. The idea of it had always sat there in the back of his head like a jar on a high shelf, and now his wife was standing in front of him holding the jar.

He felt his face go hot. He also felt something else, lower down, curious and kind of excited, and the two feelings mixed together into something he couldn't name.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, I'll try it on. But if I look stupid, you have to say so."

"You're not gonna look stupid."

"Promise?"

"I promise you won't look stupid," she said. "You might look kinda good, which is a different problem, but we'll deal with that when we get there."

She handed him the dress and headed for the door. "I'll give you some privacy. Holler when you're decent. Or not decent. Whichever."

She closed the door behind her and Connor stood alone in the workshop with a seventy-year-old dress on a hanger and his heart going harder than it had any right to.

He took his flannel off first, then his t-shirt, then he stood there in his jeans and undershirt and thought about what he was doing. It was just a dress. It was just for fun, in his own house, with his own wife, who he trusted more than anybody alive. She'd said he could say no. He hadn't said no. He'd said okay, and the okay had come out of his mouth faster than he'd expected, which told him something.

He stepped out of his jeans, kicked them over by the tool chest, and got the dress off the hanger. It went on easier than he figured it would. The fabric was soft, worn thin in a good way, like a shirt that had been washed a thousand times. The buttons went down the front and he did them up one at a time, hands not quite steady, and when he got to the collar he caught his own reflection in the window over the workbench.

Dark green with little white flowers. His shoulders filled it out more than the original owner's would have. His legs stuck out bare underneath, pale and skinny, and he had no shoes on and no plan for what came next.

He looked, if he was honest, kind of okay. Not stupid. Kind of okay.

He stood there a minute longer, turning a little, watching the hem swing at his thighs, feeling the collar sit against his neck. His face was still hot but the hot had spread, down his chest, lower, and he was grinning at the window like an idiot.

"Lia," he called out, voice cracking a little. "You can come in."

The door opened and she leaned against the frame, and whatever she'd been about to say, it died right there.

Lia stood there with her mouth open a second, then shut it and walked in slow, like the dress might spook off him.

"Well," she said. "Huh."

"Stupid? Say it now, you promised!"

"I promised you wouldn't look stupid. I didn't promise I wouldn't stare." She came around him in a slow half circle, arms crossed, nodding like she was inspecting a furnace. "Turn around. Let me see the back."

He turned. He heard her make a small sound, not a laugh, more like the noise she made when cornbread came out right.

"The buttons are crooked," she said. "Two and three are off one hole. Hold still." Her fingers worked at his collar, redid the little buttons one by one, and he felt her knuckles drag across his chest through the thin old fabric. She took longer than the job needed. Then she moved behind him and did something he hadn't noticed, the dress had a zip at the side, and she pulled it up snug and left both hands flat on his