Runaway Bride in the Dress

Chapter 1 Forty dollars of borrowed veil

Maeve Purnell had never held a knife she meant to use — not until the one with the ribbon tied around the handle, twenty minutes before her own wedding.

It was heavier than she expected. Stainless, scalloped along the edge, the kind of thing a hall keeps in a drawer and brings out twice a year, laid on a napkin beside a three-tier cake in the corridor of the Verlon church hall while, on the other side of the noticeboard, her mother told a woman named Janice that Maeve didn’t know how lucky she was.

She had come out there to get the knife. She had not, until it was in her hand, let herself think about what for.

The room she had gotten dressed in had been the Sunday school once, and nobody had ever got around to saying so out loud.

There were still hooks along the wall at the height of a six-year-old’s coat.

There was still a felt board in the corner with half a donkey stuck to it and the rest of the donkey in a shoebox underneath.

Somebody had pushed a folding table against the window and stood a mirror on it — a real one, hauled down from the Purnell house that morning in the back of Dara’s car, because the only mirror in the building was over the sink in the ladies’ and Maeve’s mother had said, more than once, that a bride does not get ready in a bathroom.

So Maeve got ready in a Sunday school, in front of a mirror with her own grandmother’s chipped gilt frame, with the clock over the door already past the half hour and no way left to be anywhere else.

The clock said 1:33. She had been watching it not move for a while now.

The dress laced up the back. That was the thing.

Not a zip, not hooks. Laces. Eleven eyelets a side, satin cord the color of skim milk.

Charlene Bidwell had gone with her to the place in Ellery and put her hand flat on the sample and said this one.

Maeve had stood there with her arms out like a scarecrow while two women she’d never met pinned it and talked over the top of her head about how it would sit once she’d lost the ten pounds.

She hadn’t lost the ten pounds. She was five foot ten and broad through the shoulders and broad through the hips, built like every Purnell woman since the Depression, and the dress had been let out twice and still held her the way a hand holds a wasp.

She could get two fingers into the lacing at her waist. She could get her arm up over her shoulder as far as the top of her spine, and the seam bit, and her hand closed on nothing.

Her hair was still pinned. Heavy dark chestnut, down past her shoulder blades since school because Everett had said once, at somebody’s barbecue in the second week they were together, that he liked a woman who kept her hair long, and nobody in three years had taken scissors to it, least of all her.

It was pinned up now under the veil, and the veil was Dara’s.

Forty dollars at the bridal outlet on the Ellery bypass, seven years ago, worn once by her sister under a rented arch in this same hall and then folded into tissue in a drawer.

No sense buying two, her mother had said, delighted with the thrift of it, and Maeve had agreed, because agreeing was what she did, and because she had never in her life been able to work out what she actually wanted while somebody else was still talking.

The netting smelled faintly of the drawer. Cedar and old paper. Her face over the top of it was the color it went by the second week of June and stayed until October, brown across the nose and the shoulders, and her eyes were doing something she didn’t like watching.

She got both arms behind her again and pulled.

Nothing. The cord ran up under a placket and finished in a bow somewhere between her shoulder blades, and whoever had tied it — Dara, an hour ago, with two hairpins in her mouth — had tied it to hold.

“Okay,” Maeve said, out loud, to the mirror. “Okay.”

Through the wall came the hall noise. Folding chairs on a wood floor, the same ten seconds of the same hymn while somebody found the right stop on the organ, the particular carrying bray of Ken Roddy telling a story he had told at every gathering in this town for thirty years.

Beet dump smell coming in the window with the heat, and under it the highway, and under that nothing, because there was nothing else in Verlon: three streets and a grain elevator and a water tower going grey and a hundred and ten people — she had addressed every one of those envelopes herself at her mother’s kitchen table — out there in good shirts, sweating, on her account.

All she had to do was open the door and say I can’t reach.

Dara was twenty feet away. Her mother was closer.

There were women in that hall who had known her since she was in a car seat and any one of them would have come in here and got their hands into those laces gladly.

That was the whole problem, standing up in the middle of the room where she could finally see it.

Because if she opened that door and said I can’t reach, somebody would come in, and then somebody else, and there would be four of them in this room, and one of them would say you’re shaking, honey, and one of them would say everybody shakes, and her mother would take hold of her by both arms and say the thing she had been saying since the August the ring went on.

You don’t know how lucky you are.

And Maeve would nod. She had watched herself nod for three years.

She had nodded in the truck showroom when Everett bought her the Tacoma she hadn’t asked for and put it in his name for the insurance.

She had nodded at the dinner where his father explained to the table what a nice change it was to see a girl who didn’t need a career to feel important.

She had nodded at the clinic in Ellery when Everett answered the doctor’s question about her before she had gotten the first word of it out of her mouth.

Years of standing in rooms full of men and never once finishing a sentence.

Not because she was frightened of them. That was what nobody got, and she had stopped trying to say it.

She wasn’t frightened. She had just found out, at twenty-three, how restful it was to be handled — how much easier the whole world went when you let the room decide and then agreed with it pleasantly — and she had liked it, and the liking was the part she could not think about with the clock over the door saying 1:33.

Her hands were shaking. She turned them over and looked at them, which did not help.

Soft hands. Not a day’s work in them, and a manicure three weeks grown out, a little pale crescent showing at every cuticle where the nail had pushed the polish up and away from her, and there was her fourth finger, bare.

She had taken the ring off at six that morning.

Standing at the dresser in her old room at her mother’s, with the yard light still on outside and the coffee going downstairs, she had slid it off to get the hand cream on properly and dropped it in the little dish where it had lived all summer — the dish with the chipped rim that had held her school earrings and, before that, her grandmother’s hairpins.

Then she had put the cream on. Then she had gone downstairs.

And she had known, on the fourth stair, in the way you know a thing in your body about seven hours before you will let it reach your mouth, that she had not forgotten it.

She had left it there. On purpose. And gone on getting married anyway, because that was also a thing you could do.

Maeve looked at the mirror a while longer.

Then she stopped looking at the mirror and started looking at the room, which was different, and which she had not done once since she walked into it.

Felt board. Shoebox. Coat hooks. A stack of hymnals.

A steel cart with a jug and eight tumblers.

The window, painted shut in 1986. The folding table, the mirror, her purse with nothing in it but a lipstick, her phone and eleven dollars.

The box with her shoes in it. The door out to the corridor.

And the other door — the side door, the one they’d propped open all morning while the men carried chairs, with the frontage road behind it and the sodium lamps and the cars nose-in on the grass.

Nothing in this room would cut a satin cord.

The cake was in the corridor.

She knew exactly where, because she had walked past it twice: a folding table under the noticeboard, driven up from the place in Ellery that Charlene liked, and beside it, on a napkin Charlene had brought because she would not use the church’s, the knife. Somebody had tied a bow on the handle.

Maeve opened the corridor door about four inches.

The corridor was empty and hot and smelled of coffee urn.

Down at the far end, where it opened into the hall, a man’s back in a grey suit, and beyond that the noise.

She went out with her skirts in both fists and the veil dragging on the doorframe, took the six steps, and picked the knife up off the napkin.

The ribbon was already coming loose.

And that was when she heard her mother.

Not in the hall — in the little passage by the kitchen, ten feet the other side of the noticeboard, with the urn hissing and Janice Roddy saying something Maeve couldn’t make out.

Then Rhonda Purnell’s voice, pitched to carry the way it had carried across every parking lot of Maeve’s entire life, warm and pleased and absolutely certain.

“—oh, she’s fine, she’s just got the nerves. Wouldn’t you?” A little laugh. “Well, Janice, I keep telling her. She doesn’t know how lucky she is.”

Maeve stood in the corridor of the Verlon church hall in seventeen pounds of white satin with a cake knife in her hand and found that she had stopped shaking.

She did not remember crossing back. She remembered the Sunday school door swinging to behind her and the mirror coming up at her, and then she was turned away from it with her chin down and her right arm cranked up behind her head, and she got the blade in under the top of the lacing where the cord crossed itself and sawed.

Satin gives all at once. Six inches of it went in three pulls — the first two eyelets, the third, the fourth — and the whole back of the dress opened off her shoulder blades and breathed, and she pulled her arm down out of the sleeve and the cold of the room got in against her spine, and she stood there a second with her head hanging, breathing like she’d run up a hill.

Then she straightened up and looked.

The bodice hung off one shoulder. Below the fourth eyelet it was still laced tight, still held her at the ribs and the waist, and it was going to stay that way, because she could reach the top of the lacing and she could not reach the rest, and there was nobody in this building she was going to ask.

Fine. It would ride a truck like that.

She got the veil off — three pins, two of them out with her hair and one left somewhere in it — and she went to lay it on the table and did not, because it was Dara’s. She folded it instead, badly, and put it on the chair where her sister would find it.

Her shoes she got back into — not the white satin ones Charlene had chosen, still in their box under the table, but the flat brown sandals she had walked over in that morning. Her purse she took, and her phone in it, off and face down and about to stay that way.

The clock over the door said 1:40. Twenty minutes.

Maeve Purnell pushed the side door open into the white glare off the frontage road, in a dress that wasn’t hers to keep and a bra strap showing at one shoulder, and the knife still shut in her fist because she had never once thought of putting it down.

She got to the end of the gravel before anybody in that hall so much as turned around.

She had no plan past the end of the street. She had eleven dollars and a phone she was not turning on and ninety miles of nothing in any direction worth pointing at, and the highway lay level and white and east-west in front of her with the heat standing up off it in sheets.

She turned left, because the pass was left, and she walked.