The Seamstress's Mistake

Dalton Carlisle was fifty-five years old and had been lost in strip malls for twenty years. Pharmaceutical rep work did that to a man. Every city looked the same after a while. Every parking lot too.

This particular lot belonged to a strip mall on Fenwick Avenue, and Dalton had three minutes to find the tailor shop that had his suit. Andres Pike's retirement dinner was Saturday. Andres had made Dalton promise, twice, that he would not show up in the gray suit with the shiny elbows.

"Everyone will be in black tie," Andres had said. "Even you, Carlisle."

So. Black tie. Dalton had ordered it weeks ago from a tailor two towns over, and the tailor had moved, apparently, or maybe Dalton had written down the wrong address. The slip of paper in his pocket said Suite 4. Suite 4 was a dress shop. Archer's Bridal, the sign said. Close enough. Paper said Suite 4. Paper was paper.

He pushed open the door. A bell jingled.

The shop was cramped. Mannequins everywhere, some headless, some just torsos on poles, all of them wearing white. Bolts of fabric leaned against the walls like drunks holding each other up. The air smelled like starch and old perfume.

A young woman behind the counter looked up. Twenty-something, maybe twenty-eight, pencil behind her ear, a clipboard in her hand and panic on her face.

"Are you the groom?" she said.

"I'm a groom-adjacent figure," Dalton said. "Suit pickup. Carlisle."

"Right, right, yes." She was already moving, clipboard abandoned. "You're early, which is honestly a gift. Room's ready. Go on back, third curtain. I'll be with you in a second, I just have to..." She gestured at the phone, which was ringing, and at the door, where another woman was entering, and at the general chaos of her life.

"Third curtain," Dalton said.

"Third curtain. You know the drill."

He did not know the drill. But the paper said Suite 4, and the suit was probably hanging in there, and he was already late. He went back.

The fitting room was down a narrow hallway lined with mirrors. Curtain one. Curtain two. Third curtain, half open. He grabbed it and yanked it shut behind him.

"You're not the groom."

Dalton turned around.

There was a woman standing on a low wooden platform, and she was holding the front of a seafoam green dress to her chest, and she was not wearing much else, and Dalton's brain did a full stop and reverse.

"Felicia," he said. "Felicia from 3C."

Felicia Byrne lived two doors down from him. Fifty-two years old, retired from something, always had her mail tucked under her arm like a newspaper. She had waved at him in the elevator maybe a hundred times. She had never once been standing in front of him in a bridesmaid dress with her bare back showing.

"Dalton," she said. "Dalton from 3A."

"Yes. That's me. I'm going to just..." He pointed at the curtain.

"Don't you dare," she said it fast, half laughing. "There's a maniac bride out there and her mother, and if I open that curtain they will descend on me like seagulls on a dropped pretzel. You just stay right there, Mr. Chivalry."

Dalton stayed right there. Mr. Chivalry. He hadn't been called anything that flattering since the Clinton administration.

The problem was the platform. It was a narrow platform. The problem was also that Dalton had nowhere to put his eyes, and every place his eyes wanted to go was the exact wrong place. So he looked at the mirror, which was somehow worse, because the mirror showed him everything he was trying not to look at directly.

"How did you even get in here?" Felicia asked. She was fumbling at the back of the dress, which was mostly a collection of loose fabric and hope.

"Paper said Suite 4. I have a suit coming." He paused. "I'm starting to suspect my suit is not in this room."

"Nope. Just me and about forty yards of taffeta." She huffed a laugh at herself in the mirror. "My niece is getting married. I got roped into the wedding party at my age. Estelle, the girl at the counter, she just took over this place from me. I ran it thirty years. She's got the whole schedule in her head and maybe half of it's right. She probably wrote you down as somebody's husband."

"That tracks," Dalton said. "She asked if I was the groom."

"And you said?"

"Groom-adjacent figure."

Felicia laughed. It was a real laugh, unguarded, and it did something warm to the small cramped room. "Groom-adjacent. God. You should meet the actual groom. He's a caterer I knew years ago, back when I was forty-two and made some choices." She rolled her eyes at her reflection. "Ten years later he's marrying my niece. Small towns, small strip malls."

"That's a hell of a thing," Dalton said.

"It's a hell of a dress, is what it is." She twisted, trying to reach the zipper, and failed. The fabric slipped a little and she caught it. "Okay. Dalton. I need to ask you something and I need you to be a professional about it."

"I have never been a professional about anything in my life."

"Good. Then you're overqualified." She turned her back to him and lifted her hair off her neck with one hand. Her spine was a long clean line, freckled at the top where the sun had gotten at it. "Zip me. Please. It's a two-person job and Estelle is busy hiding from the mother of the bride."

Dalton looked at the zipper. It was very small. Her back was very bare. The math was not complicated but his hands had stopped being sure of anything.

"Fair warning," he said, stepping onto the platform behind her, "my fingers have handled pills for twenty years. Tiny little pills. But this looks like watch repair."

"Just don't sew me into it. My niece would never let me live it down."

He took the little metal tab. His knuckles brushed her skin. She went still, just for a second, and he felt it, that small stillness, and it traveled up his arms like a current. He worked the zipper up one tooth at a time. The dress closed around her like it had been waiting for her.

"There," he said, quieter than he meant to.

"Thank you." She didn't move away. He didn't either. They stood there in the mirror, two people from 3A and 3C, closer than they'd ever been at four feet of distance in the elevator.

"You know," Felicia said, catching his eye in the glass, "the pipes in our building have been screaming for a month. The hot water one. Sounds like a dying cat."

"That's my floor doing that."

"Is it? Every night at eleven?"

"Every night at eleven. Sorry. That's me running the dishwasher like a criminal."

She laughed again, and this time he felt it through the floor of the platform, through his shoes.

"Well," she said, "maybe the criminal and I should split the plumbing bill sometime. Coffee first. Then plumbing."

Dalton was going to answer. He was. Then the curtain rang open on its snagged track like a cheap doorbell, and Estelle stood there holding a garment bag, and her face went through about six expressions in one second.

"Oh," she said. "Oh no. You're not Mr. Kowalski!"

Estelle held up the garment bag like evidence. "Mr. Kowalski's suit is at the counter. This is the fitting room. Fitting rooms are for fittings."

"That's fair," Dalton said.

"Ma'am, I am so sorry, the schedule said eleven and I just assumed, I have your whole book in my head and half of it's wrong, I'm still learning the regulars, I..."

"Estelle." Felicia's voice was calm. Mother-of-four calm, though Dalton didn't actually know if she'd had kids. He realized he knew almost nothing about her. Four hundred elevator waves and not one fact. "It's fine. Really. Mr. Kowalski here was just helping me with a zipper."

"Right. Zippers. Normal. I'll be at the counter." The curtain snagged again on the way shut. It made that same cheap doorbell noise. Then silence.

Felicia turned around. She was still holding the front of the dress against her chest with one hand, which was modest and also pointless, since the back was basically open to the world.

"Well," she said. "That went well."

"Could've gone worse."

"How?"

"I could've been Mr. Kowalski and you could've been his wife."

She snorted. She actually snorted, and Dalton liked her more for it. She shuffled over to the little bench and sat down, taffeta pooling around her like sea foam. Like the ocean had washed up a fifty-two-year-old woman in a strip mall.

"So," she said. "Suit guy. Tell me something true. You've seen me half-dressed, seems fair."

"That's not the deal I thought I was getting when I woke up today."

"Deal's changed. Sit down."

There wasn't a second chair. There was a bolt of ivory satin and a wobbly stool. He took the stool. His knees were about a foot from hers.

"Something true," he said. "Okay. I've never been married."

She raised an eyebrow. "Never?"

"Never. Twenty years as a pharmaceutical rep. They hand you a new territory every two years. I've kept the same apartment the whole time and slept in it maybe half the nights. You learn the highways and nothing else. I've got a good memory for exit numbers and a terrible memory for people. It's not a sad story. It's just a story with a lot of driving in it."

"Huh." She looked at him, really looked, and Dalton had to resist the urge to check his own exit numbers. "I did it the other way. Stayed put my whole life. Same building, same job, same diner on Sundays. Never married either."

"Never wanted to?"

"Never wanted to," she said it plain, no apology in it. "People hear that and think I'm sad about it. I'm not. I watched my friends marry men who ate soup loudly and I thought, no thank you, I like my quiet. I like my machines humming and my Saturdays empty. Ten years ago I had a fling with that caterer, actually. Before he was the nephew-in-law. It was fun and then it was over and neither of us needed a lawyer. That's my speed."

"That's a very honest answer."

"You asked."

"I didn't, actually. But I'm glad I know it."

"You're glad a lot of things, Dalton Carlisle." She stood up. The dress rustled. "Now help me out of this thing before Estelle comes back with a camera."