The Reunion Dress

I turned sixty-two this fall, and I figured by then I'd know better than to wear my heart to my own son's wedding. Turns out I don't. My name is Markus Weiss, and the story I'm about to tell you starts at the bar of a converted barn, with a cider in my hand I wasn't drinking and my eyes locked on my ex-wife in a deep green dress.

The barn is mine, out behind the farmhouse, and its makeover was Alice's doing. She'd been planning family events for us for ten years, and she'd outdone herself this time. Fairy lights everywhere, hay bales stacked into seating, lanterns strung over a dance floor that smelled like nothing because the woodsmoke and cider smell came in every time the doors swung open. It was warm for October. Warm enough that the whole night felt suspended, like the world was giving us one soft evening before winter.

Delia looked incredible. I want to get that out early because everything that follows only makes sense if you understand that she looked incredible. Sixty years old and the green dress fit her like it had been sewn on her, sleeveless, her silver hair pinned up with the little pearl combs she wore the night we got engaged. We met at twenty, married at twenty-two, divorced at fifty-eight. That's four years of divorce now, and I never once stopped loving her, which is either romantic or stupid depending on who you ask. My son would say both.

The first dance started and I stayed at the bar like I'd planned, nursing the cider. Markus the father of the groom, standing back, dignified, done his job. That was the plan. The plan lasted through exactly one song.

Carlo came and got me. He's the best man, thirty-six, the groom's old roommate, a man who treats every party like it's his personal responsibility. He set his beer down on the bar next to mine, clapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Nope. You don't get to hide at the bar all night, old man. Dance floor. Now."

I told him I was pacing myself. He said pacing was for funerals and hauled me out by the elbow.

So there I was, mid-floor, in my good suit, shuffling to something with a fiddle in it, and I was doing fine until Delia drifted over. She didn't make a thing of it. She just appeared at my shoulder the way she used to at the grocery store, and her hand brushed mine on some turn, and then again, and then her fingers laced through mine like it was thirty years ago and we still had the whole map in front of us.

"You still can't dance," she said.

"You still can't stop criticizing," I said back, and she laughed, and for the length of that song I was the happiest divorced man in the county.

Then the song ended and she was swept off by somebody, and that's where the night stopped being simple.

I got another cider and watched her from the bar, which was apparently the only place I'm allowed to exist. She was laughing with a tall stranger in a gray suit. He had a full head of hair and a wedding ring and an easy way of standing that I've never had, and she had her hand on his forearm doing that thing she does when a story is good, touching, leaning in, bright. I know that laugh. I married that laugh. And some old ugly thing in my gut twisted up and started wringing itself.

Jealousy at sixty-two is embarrassing. I'll admit that straight out. You'd think a man my age would have made peace with the fact that his ex-wife is a person who talks to other people. But there I stood, gripping a plastic cup, watching her tip her head back at some joke Gray Suit made, and I hated him with a purity I hadn't felt since our last year of marriage, which, funny enough, was the year we stopped being able to stand each other. Funny how the hate and the love never really separated. They just took turns holding the wheel.

I went outside.

The yard behind the barn was all string lights and pickup trucks and quiet. I leaned against my truck, the old Ford, and looked up at a sky that didn't care about my problems, and I did some breathing. That was where Delia found me maybe twenty minutes later. She came out the side door with her heels in one hand, grass under her bare feet, and stopped about six feet away like she'd rehearsed the approach.

"There you are," she said. "You vanished."

"Needed air."

"You've been needing air all night." She came closer, wrapped her arms around herself even though it wasn't cold. "Markus. Can I say something without you getting defensive?"

"That's a real promising opener."

She smiled, then didn't. "I miss him," she said. "The man who used to dress up for me. Do you remember? Halloween, costume parties, that time you came to my birthday as Rhett Butler. You'd put on anything. A dress, once, at that party at the Hendersons', just to make me laugh, and you wore it all night and danced in it and didn't care who looked. You were so brave then. You were so fun. And then somewhere along the way you got embarrassed. Of everything. Of me, near the end."

I didn't say anything. My heart was doing something I won't describe in polite company.

"I'm not asking for anything," she went on. "It's our son's wedding day, I'm not ruining it. But I looked at you across that dance floor and I thought, there's my husband. Not my ex. My husband. And I don't know what to do with that, so I came out here to tell you and now I've told you." She put her heels back on, which took her a moment, balancing on one foot against the truck. "Think about it or don't."

Then she went back inside, and I stood by my Ford for a long while, doing math.

Here's the part I've never told anybody, and I'm telling you now because this is a story about a dress. In the toolbox under the bed of my truck, wrapped in an old quilt, there has been a dress for three years. A vintage one, forest green, bought at an estate sale two towns over about a year after the divorce, when I was so lonely I'd drive anywhere on Saturdays just to be around people. I saw it on a mannequin and bought it before I let myself think about why. I told myself it was for her, that I'd give it to her sometime, that I'd say here, this is the kind of thing you used to love. But that was a lie I told myself while I tried it on in my barn loft at midnight, alone, fifty-nine years old, standing in front of my mother's old mirror with my hands shaking.

I never gave it to her. I never wore it for anyone. It lived in the truck like a seed I didn't have the nerve to plant.