11. Mandy #2
“You’re not going in there as a Christmas ornament,” Mary Jo said around a bobby pin in her teeth. “You’re going in there as the woman Andy showed up with. There’s a difference. You’ll feel it when the room makes you feel it.”
“What does that mean?”
“The room will tell you what kind of attention is on you. The kind that wants your husband’s name is different from the kind that wants to know what you raise. Give the second one back. It throws them.”
“And Mandy. If somebody recognizes you tonight, you let me handle it. You don’t make a face. You don’t apologize. You sip your drink, you give them a particular kind of smile I’ll show you in a minute, and you let me handle it.”
Mandy’s throat went tight. Not the social version, the kind with a half-life, that ran to phones and names and the particular quiet that followed a helpful call to the right number.
She’d been waiting for Mary Jo to walk through a door, and the door Mary Jo had walked through was the one Mandy hadn’t even known was there. “You knew.”
“Honey.” Mary Jo put both palms on Mandy’s shoulders and met her eyes in the mirror.
“I have done my brother’s books for more years than I care to admit.
I know what a runaway looks like, and I know what an heiress walks like.
I have known you were one of them and did not care which since your second week.
We do not have to talk about it. I want you to know I am not driving into that gala beside a woman I do not have a hand on. ”
Mandy sat very still while Mary Jo finished her right eye. She did not cry because Mary Jo would have to do it again. Twice in one week, someone had admitted to knowing more than Mandy had told them and had not demanded payment for the knowledge.
“Stand up.”
Mandy hesitated for one second, a flinch left over from sixteen, from dropping a robe in a fitting room in front of a Frenchwoman with pins in her mouth, and then she dropped it.
Mary Jo wasn’t looking at her body; she had already gone to the closet door at the end of the hall and lifted the dress off the hanger.
On the chair beside Mandy, folded in tissue, were plain new underthings, set out without comment the way the shoes had been, and Mandy put them on.
It came toward her in Mary Jo’s arms.
The silk was deep green, nearly black at the seams, with a weight that kept it from fluttering.
Long sleeves. High neck. A skirt falling from the natural waist. No beading, appliqué, or statement.
Mandy had owned closets of clothing that announced what they cost. She had never owned anything this quiet.
“My friend Lillian wore this to the cattlemen’s in 1988 and again in 1994,” Mary Jo said into the silk. “It came to me when she died. I have lent it out three times, and twice it came back better than I sent it. Step in.”
Mandy stepped in.
The silk rose over Mandy’s legs and settled against her body. Mary Jo zipped it slowly, careful of her hair. The dress had been made for another woman and fit Mandy anyway. It told the truth about her shape without trying to improve it.
She turned to the mirror in Mary Jo’s bedroom.
The woman in the mirror was somebody Mandy had been all her life, stripped of the noise.
She stood there for a while.
“Sit,” Mary Jo said behind her. “Shoes.”
The box held closed-toe brown suede heels, two inches and a little.
Beautiful, worn, and exactly Mandy’s size.
Mary Jo had asked in passing two days ago without saying why.
Mandy’s feet had grown accustomed to Andrew’s black boots over two pairs of wool socks.
The suede found the old pressure points.
Her body remembered how to rise into heels.
She stood up. She didn’t wobble.
“There she is,” Mary Jo said, then turned her face away to put the curling iron back in its box so Mandy didn’t have to see Mary Jo’s expression about it.
They went into the living room to wait. The sun had moved off the rug.
Mary Jo had a cardigan on now over her own dress, which was navy and simple and very Mary Jo, and she hadn’t made a thing of putting her own dress on, which somehow made Mandy love her.
They sat on the couch with the Pendleton folded behind them and didn’t say anything for a few minutes.
The chrysanthemums in the cut-crystal vase on the side table had opened another quarter inch in the warm room.
Mandy felt the dress against the backs of her thighs. The silk had warmed to her body. She put one hand flat on her own knee through it.
A truck came up the street. Mandy knew the sound before she understood it: the catch in Andrew’s old Ford on the downshift, heard twice a day for a month and often just before sleep. Her stomach tightened.
Mary Jo went to the window. “He’s here. Lord, he washed the truck.”
“He washed the truck.”
“He washed it last night. I drove past. He was in the floodlight at the barn with a bucket and the truck was wet. I didn’t stop. I drove past so he wouldn’t have to be seen washing it.”
That was new information. Mandy stood up.
She walked through Mary Jo’s small bright house in heels.
The floorboards made a different sound under her.
She went past the kitchen with the Coke bottles still on the table beside the chrysanthemums and the empty wine glass with a thumbprint on the bowl, and Mary Jo opened the front door for her without a word.
Andrew stood at the driver’s door in his long town coat and brown felt hat. A white shirt showed beneath the coat. His jaw had been freshly shaved where he usually let the gray go through Saturday.
He didn’t move. He didn’t say a word.
Whatever he had been about to say left him. He looked at the green dress, her pinned hair, and the neck he had spent a month avoiding.
Then he took off his hat. “Amanda,” he said quietly.
He had called her Amanda once and been corrected. He had not used it again. Tonight it did not sound like a mistake.
“Andrew,” she said.
Mandy came down the porch steps carefully, finding the remembered rhythm of silk and heels. Behind her, Mary Jo moved toward her own car. She had already told Mandy she would drive separately.
Andrew opened the passenger door. He did not put a hand beneath Mandy’s elbow. He only held the door while she gathered the skirt and climbed into the cab. The silk whispered against the bench seat. Andrew let out a breath behind her.
The door shut.
He walked around the front of the truck. At the fender, he paused with one hand against the clean metal and lowered his head for half a second.
Then he came around and got in.
He kept both hands on the wheel. The truck pulled away from Mary Jo’s bright house. Mandy sat beside him in the green silk and the silence neither of them appeared ready to break.