The Secret Lives of Dresses (22 page)

“I don’t think of you as aimless.” Con inspected the bag for any hidden potato chips. “You seem pretty precisely aimed to me.”

“Oh, did Mimi tell you I was thinking about grad school? That’s me hitting the snooze button on the ‘What do I do with my life?’ alarm clock.”

“She does talk about you a lot—but I was thinking about the store. Not a lot of people could step right in and keep all the plates spinning the way you have.”

Dora sighed. “It’s just to keep busy, and keep Camille and Tyffanee away, really. I’d burn the place down for the insurance money before I’d let them sell their tacky crap in Mimi’s place. She’d never forgive me.”

“Don’t look now, but I think Mimi’s insurance guy is over there by the door, so perhaps you want to keep your voice down?”

Dora giggled.

“Mimi’s insurance guy is Mr. Bannell, and he would love it if I burned the place down. He seems to think Mimi’s been cheated because she’s never had to make a claim. He might go in and smash a few windows himself. I’ve never seen a guy so eager to pay out money. . . .”

“Bannell? He’s, like, ninety, wears bow ties?”

“That’s him.”

Con looked stern. “I’ve seen him hanging around Mimi. I bet he has a crush.”

“What he has is five remaining clients and retirement-induced boredom. He’s so bored he’s itching for paperwork to file.” Dora pushed her half-finished potato chips over to Con, who started eating them absentmindedly.

“Didn’t Mimi ever think of remarrying? After your grandfather died? What was he like?”

“I don’t really remember my grandfather—he wasn’t in good health when I was born, and he died when I was about three. But Mimi really loved him. . . . There’s this
warmth
in her voice whenever she talks about him. Like she has a private joke she doesn’t want to share. I don’t think anybody else could ever measure up. Plus she had me—I don’t think there are many retired guys who want to spend their golden years raising someone else’s grandbaby.”

“And there’s Gabby.”

“Can’t forget Gabby. She has had enough husbands for both of them.”

“How many? Four?”

“Just three.”

“
Just
three? How many are you planning to have?” Con looked stern.

“Oh, I thought I’d start with one, see how that works out,” said Dora, airily.

“Right. Sounds like a plan. Got any applicants?” Con crunched a chip with what seemed like unnecessary force.

“Not at the present time.” Dora felt a little stab, a little twinge, in the sore place that was thinking about Gary, but she ignored it.

Con looked as if he were going to say something else, but a loud, singsongy
“Dorrrr-uhhhhh”
interrupted them, followed at slightly less than the speed of sound by Tyffanee, who clomped up to their booth in her pink sheepskin boots.

“
Dor-
a, I went to the shop and it was closed!” Tyffanee made an exaggerated sad-face.

Dora didn’t let herself be drawn. “Mimi closes at six on Tuesday, Tyff. I thought you knew.”

“The mall stays open until eight p.m., so I totally thought she, I mean, you would, too.” Tyffanee’s pout was layered in lip gloss so wet and shiny that Dora felt embarrassed to look at it, as if it were somehow obscene. She supposed that was the point.

“Not enough foot traffic in that neighborhood to justify staying open until then,” Con broke in. He extended his hand to Tyffanee. “Hi, I’m Con, you must be Tyffanee. Nice to meet you.”

Tyffanee stopped whining for Con, Dora noticed. Her voice dropped, and she flicked her hair back over her shoulder like a shampoo commercial. “Nice to meet you, too, Con.” She drew out his name and looked up through her lashes at him. “How do you know Dora?”

“Con’s a friend of Mimi’s,” Dora said, a little too abruptly.

“Well, any friend of Mimi’s . . .” Tyffanee trailed off with a little giggle, and cocked her head to the side for good measure.

“Tyff! Tyff!
Tyff!
” The gaggle of girls that had accompanied Tyffanee into Lud’s had grown restive. “Gotta go! See you ’round?” And with a final hair-toss, Tyffanee was absorbed back into the group.

“Ah. So that’s Tyffanee?” Con sounded amused.

“That’s her. In the aggressively tanned flesh.”

“She has a, um, different aesthetic than you and Mimi, doesn’t she?”

Dora looked down at that day’s dress. All of a sudden, she felt self-conscious, costumey. “I still don’t feel like I have the Mimi aesthetic down, but Tyffanee . . . Let’s just say she’d rather shave her head than wear a dress from Mimi’s
.”

Con’s eyes had drifted back to Tyffanee, who was vying with her friends to be the one to proclaim the loudest about how bad they were being by eating an actual sandwich. “I can see that.”

Dora felt awkward; Con had made his way through the rest of the chips, and another couple was standing nearby, eyeing them hopefully.

“We should let someone else sit down,” she said.

“I guess . . .” Con agreed reluctantly. At least, Dora thought Con was showing reluctance, but what did she know? Con looked at her quizzically. She must have been staring. But “Can I give you a ride home?” was all he said.

“Actually, could you drop me at the store? I should ride my bike back—it’s not far.”

“Are you sure? It’s pretty late.”

“I’m sure—I probably shouldn’t leave it locked up there two nights in a row. Nobody would steal it, but they might cart it off as abandoned.”

Con nodded and gathered up their trash. “Okay, one ride to the store, coming up.”

“Thank you—and thank you for dinner—it was really nice of you!”

“Anytime,” Con said. He smiled.

It took a few minutes to get out of the parking lot. The whole time, Dora felt like she had forgotten something in Lud’s, but she had everything. Her bag, her keys, her phone, her wallet. They stopped in front of Mimi’s store. Con seemed to be tilting in her direction, almost as if he was planning on a good-night kiss. Had this been a date? Dora didn’t know.

“Okay, then, have a good night,” said Dora, as she fumbled hurriedly with the door handle. “Are you working tomorrow? Come by the store when you have your lunch break. I mean, if you want. If you have time. Okay?” She was babbling.

“Will do.” Con looked a bit bemused.

Dora hopped out, and instantly felt as if she’d done the wrong thing. For all she knew, Con kissed everyone goodbye. Even Mrs. Featherston.

Dora rode home, put the bike in the garage, went inside, sorted through the mail, put on pajamas, and made herself a cup of tea. Camille was mysteriously absent, and Dora didn’t feel any need to track her down. She was halfway through half watching a rerun of
Buffy
when Gabby called.

“My meeting tonight is taking a little longer than I thought, sweetie. Don’t wait up—you get some rest.”

“The flower-show committee reach an impasse?” Dora joked.

“Something like that. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well, baby.”

“I will. Good night, Gabby.”

Dora plugged her cell phone into the charger and set the phone to vibrate. Her tea was cold. She thought about seeing if Camille had bought any Chubby Hubby, but even ice cream didn’t sound appealing.

Dora got halfway up the stairs before she realized she’d left the front light on, just as she used to do when she was expecting Mimi home late. Defiantly, she continued to the top. Another thirty cents’ worth of electricity wouldn’t tip the environment into global-warming catastrophe, she thought. And she should really leave it on for Gabby. Gabby really never was out this late, though. Something was definitely going on. Dora dropped another coin of worry into that particular piggy bank.

She was asleep almost immediately, but not before she heard Gabby’s voice at the front door. There seemed to be a long pause between the door’s opening and closing, but Dora was too drowsy to wonder about it.

T
he store opened late on Wednesdays, but Dora went in early. The more time she spent in the store, the more time she wanted to spend in the store. This morning she planned to redo the mannequins.

It’ll be a surprise for Mimi
, she told herself, but really it was a self-indulgence. When Dora was little, when she was very good, she’d been allowed to add something to a new window display when Mimi put it up. Mimi had been very particular about her windows, so Dora would spend an afternoon trawling through the store, winnowing through the possibilities. She’d always restricted herself to accessories, though: jewelry, hats, scarves, shoes—once or twice a jacket or two, usually thrown over the mannequins’ shoulders, as their arms were even more unyielding than their akimbo postures would suggest.

She’d never ventured a dress. Until now.

The whole process was complicated by the mannequins themselves—not their fragility and rigidity, but their personalities. Because they did have personalities. Nedra, in the north window, was tough, confident, maybe, just maybe, a tad brassy or vulgar; Nellie, in the south window, was fragile, retiring, highly refined, and a bit of a hypochondriac (that’s why she had the south window). Nellie was always threatening to lose a limb.

Mimi’s windows had always had stories, Dora realized. She had already undressed the mannequins and drawn the curtains to hide the empty stands. They weren’t stories like the big department-store Christmas windows, like “Cinderella,” or “The Nutcracker”; but they were stories nevertheless.

Nedra had swaggering stories. “This window is Nedra becoming vice-president of a corporation,” Mimi would say, and there Nedra would be in the window, obviously an executive in a trim suit (but still Nedra, with one too many buttons on the blouse left undone), a hat at a rakish angle, a flashy brooch on the jacket. “This window is Nellie writing letters to her soldier,” and Nellie would be in a housedress, a basket of folded linens at her feet, a gold necklace with a little pen on it around her neck, half of a friendship-token bracelet dangling from her wrist. (That last had been Dora’s one addition.)

Dora thought that in her windows Nedra would be living a life of intrigue—sexy spy, she decided, wrap dress or pussy-cat bow under a long trench, maybe leather, definitely sunglasses—and Nellie would be her pop-culture counterpoint, the sexy librarian, solving a problem in her prim dress and elegant cardigan, glasses perched for effect on the top of Nellie’s head. (One of Nellie’s many disappointments was that her extremely flat ears—in fact, they were painted on—did not allow for sunglasses.)

Dora wrestled Nedra into a deep-green wrap dress (more subtle than red) and draped her leather trench over her shoulders. Her sunglasses were aviators, and Dora adjusted a binoculars bag to rest on her hip just so. Fedora, or no fedora? Dora left it on the counter to get Maux’s opinion later.

Nellie was harder to get into her cotton shirtdress, her loose arm always threatening auto-amputation, but soon her cardigan was nicely draped and a string of colored beads was balanced right where Nellie’s collarbone would be, if Nellie had been endowed with one.

Dora finished just before opening time. She unlocked the door, pulled open the window curtains, and went outside to gauge the effect.

Con was on the sidewalk, talking into his phone. “Can I put a rush on this delivery? How much of a rush? Well, do you have a time machine? Yeah, yeah, same client, Larry.” Con waved at Dora, making “in a minute”–type faces at her.

Dora looked into her windows. Nellie looked off-center. She’d have to fix that. Nedra looked pretty good, though. Not up to Mimi’s standard, of course, but better than most of the windows on the block (the hardware-store display of sun-bleached plumbing snakes being a particularly low point).

Con hung up. “Hey, good morning, Dora! How’s it going?” He paused. “You changed the windows—they look good.”

“Thanks. I know they’re not as good as Mimi’s. . . .” Dora stopped. The phone was ringing inside the store.

“We’re not open quite yet—I’ll let the answering machine pick it up.” Mimi always used to yell at her, when she was little, for running for the phone. “Don’t answer it all out of breath, it makes people wonder what you’ve been doing,” she said.

The answering machine clicked on. “Miss Winston, this is Dr. Czerny at Forsyth, could you . . .”

Dora ran inside. She knocked the waiting fedora to the floor as she lunged for the phone.

“Hello?” Dora paused to catch her breath, willing Dr. Czerny to talk.

“Dora? This is Dr. Czerny. I think you should come to the hospital.”

Dora barely managed to choke out an “Okay. I’ll be right there.” She looked up. Con had already picked up the hat. “I’ll drive,” he said.

Dora sat in the hallway. Nurses walked back and forth and didn’t look at her; people walked in and out of the other rooms, and Dora didn’t look at them.

Dr. Czerny stopped in front of her. “Dora. I’m glad you came so quickly.”

Dora didn’t think she had been called in for good news. But she felt she had to leave the possibility open. “There’s been a change?”

“We managed to stop the bleeding in her brain, but her heart couldn’t take the strain. I’m afraid she’s failing.”

“I did find her living will, but I keep forgetting to bring it.” Dora unreasonably felt as if Dr. Czerny was her teacher, and that Dora was trying to explain why she didn’t have her homework.

“That’s okay. We got a copy of her DNR from her internist.”

“DNR?” Dora felt that at one point she had known what those initials meant. She was a terrible student today.

“It’s a do-not-resuscitate order. If Mrs. Winston’s heart stops, she doesn’t want us to restart it by artificial means.”

“And her heart is going to stop.”

“It’s not certain, but it’s likely.”