The Dentist's Dress

Connie Hastings turned 62 on a Tuesday, and nobody knew but her.

She had made her own breakfast, scrambled eggs and toast, and put a single candle in a leftover cupcake from the church bake sale. She lit it, sang half of the birthday song to herself in the kitchen, stopped because it felt silly, and blew it out anyway. The wish was the same one she had made for forty years running, which was ridiculous, and she knew it was ridiculous, and she made it anyway.

She had always figured romance would find her eventually. That was the story you were told as a girl, that love showed up like a bus, and if you missed one there would be another along. She had waited at the stop a long time. She dated a fellow named Doug for a while in her thirties, but he liked golf more than he liked her, and she had let him go without much fuss. There was one night at a community college party when she was 22, a fling with a classmate that lasted about a month and ended with a phone call she still remembered word for word. After that, nothing much. She worked, she kept her little house clean, she flossed twice a day because she was a dental hygienist and it would be embarrassing otherwise.

Sixty-two. She rinsed her cup, looked out the window at her neighbor's recycling bin still sitting at the curb two days after pickup, and decided that on her birthday, at least, she was not going to be the person who called the city about a bin.

Karen Cohen had called her the week before about the church fair. The costume booth needed sorting, every year it needed sorting, and every year Karen said the same thing, which was that next year she would start earlier. Connie had said yes before Karen even finished the sentence. It was something to do on a day that otherwise had a candle in a cupcake on the calendar and nothing else.

"Meet me at the feed store," Karen had said. "They're letting us use the back room again. Oh, and Connie, Johnny Whitaker owns the place now. Did you know that? Bought it off the Hendersons two years back."

Connie had known. She wasn't sure how she had known, whether it was gossip or the paper, but she had known, and she had thought about it for a day or two and then put it away in the drawer where she kept things she didn't want to think about.

* * *

The feed store smelled the way it had always smelled, hay and dust and something animal underneath, except now there was mothball in the mix too, because the back room had become the fair's costume storage and somebody had gone to war against moths in there. Connie arrived at nine in the morning with a thermos of coffee and her reading glasses on a chain around her neck, which was a new development she resented.

Karen was already there, a stack of plastic bins around her like a fort. She was 58, four years younger than Connie, and she had the energy of a woman who had never once sat down and thought about anything.

"There she is! Birthday girl." Karen came around the bins and hugged her. "I didn't forget. I never forget a birthday, it's my one talent."

"It's not until next week," Connie lied, out of pure habit.

Karen gave her a look over the top of her glasses. "It is today, Connie Hastings, and don't think I don't know it. We'll do lunch after. My treat. Now look at this mess."

The mess was considerable. Boxes of costumes going back decades, some of them older than Karen, plastic bags that had melted onto fabric, a rack of things on hangers that had fused together like they were afraid of being separated. The back room had a dressing area cornered off with a curtain, a mirror that had gone cloudy with dust, and a single bulb overhead that gave everything a slightly jaundiced look.

"Johnny said use whatever we need," Karen said, hauling a box across the floor. "He's good like that. He came by Sunday and moved the heavy stuff for me. Still a nice man, that one."

"Still," Connie said, and let it sit there.

"Oh, come on. You two went to school together. One kiss at Marty Ellison's party forty-odd years ago and you've both acted like the other one has a contagious disease ever since."

"It was Marty Ellison's party, and we were both drunk, and it lasted about two seconds." Connie folded a flannel shirt that turned out to be a costume for a scarecrow. "And it wasn't forty-odd. It was forty. Exactly."

Karen smiled in a way that made Connie regret doing the math out loud.

They worked most of the morning. Connie sorted by size and decade, which was her method, and Karen sorted by vibes, which was hers, and between them they got three bins done and one argument about whether a sequined jacket from the eighties was worth keeping. It was, Connie said, because somebody always wanted it. Nobody ever wanted it, but she liked knowing it was there.

Around eleven, Karen's phone rang. She stepped out to the front of the store to take it, and that was when the mix-up happened.

A man from the church had dropped off a box that morning, one of the volunteers, and he had left it by the curtain with a note on it that said KAREN in block letters. Karen, passing through a few minutes before her phone rang, had picked it up, seen her name, and carried it into the dressing corner, where she'd opened it, muttered something about sizes, and left it on the stool inside the curtain. Then her phone rang and she went.

So when Connie came around the rack a few minutes later with an armful of hats and saw the box with KAREN on it sitting inside the dressing area, she did what any sensible person would do. She decided to be helpful. She stepped through the curtain to move the box somewhere Karen would actually find it.

That was when she saw the dress.

It was hanging on a hook by the mirror, and it had not been in any box. It was silk, or something like silk, a deep green that had gone slightly darker at the folds, and it had little covered buttons down the front and a neck that dipped just enough to be interesting. Somebody had left it there, probably one of Johnny's people, or maybe it had come in with a donation. It was the kind of dress that made you think of a woman who went places.

Connie looked at it the way you look at a dog in a pet store window, with no intention at all and then complete intention.

"Karen," she called through the curtain. "Whose dress is this?"

No answer. Karen was still out front, her voice drifting in faintly, something about a delivery schedule.

Connie hung the hats on the rack. She told herself she was just checking the tag for a size, because Karen would want to know if it was fair stock or somebody's personal property. The tag was handwritten, no size, just the word VINTAGE in careful letters. The fabric slid through her fingers like cold water.

Well. She was alone. Nobody would know. She was wearing a cardigan her sister had sent her, plain brown slacks, shoes chosen for standing all day. She had looked in her own mirror that morning and seen a clean, tidy, entirely forgettable woman of 62, and she had thought, as she did every year on this particular day, that she had hoped for more somehow, though she couldn't have said more what.

She unbuttoned the green dress off its hanger, stepped out of her slacks, and put it on. It fit. That was the shocking part. It fit across the shoulders and it moved when she moved and it fell to just below her knee like it had been waiting for somebody her exact shape. There was a pair of heels on the floor by the stool, low dark heels, and she stepped into them because it seemed the thing to do, the completing gesture.

The mirror was dusty and the bulb was harsh and neither of those things mattered. Connie looked at herself and felt a thrill go up from her heels to her ears, an honest one, the kind she had not felt since she was young enough to be embarrassed by it. She turned sideways. She pushed her hair back with both hands. She looked, she would have said, as a woman who had somewhere to be.

There were three knocks on the curtain rod.

"Hello?" said a voice she hadn't heard in forty years, a voice that had gotten deeper but hadn't changed otherwise. "Karen? You in there? I've got a box of lights for the booth, wherever you want them."

The green dress did not have pockets, so Connie's hands had nowhere to go.

"Karen?" the voice said again. "You in there?"

Connie opened her mouth to say no, Karen wasn't, and that Connie would be out in a minute, and what came out instead was nothing at all. The curtain shifted an inch at the side and Johnny Whitaker looked in.

He had a cardboard box under one arm and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he was sixty-three years old and heavier than he'd been at Marty Ellison's party, and none of that mattered either. He stopped. The box lowered itself slowly to the floor, or maybe he lowered it, Connie couldn't have said.

"Well," he said.

"I can explain," Connie said, which was not an explanation and she knew it. Her hands were still up near her hair, caught mid-gesture, and she let them down slowly like that would make things less strange.

"Please don't," Johnny said. "I'm enjoying this."

"Johnny." She put a hand on the stool to steady herself. The heels were higher than her work shoes by an inch and a half and she felt every one of them. "There was a box with Karen's name on it. I was being helpful. The dress was here. I was going to take it off."

"Are you?"

"No," she admitted.

He nodded, like that was a reasonable answer, and