Blue Cotton Work Shirts Stitched Together for a Spring Dance
I looked at the blue cloth, then down at my own hands, where my silver signet ring felt heavy on my pinky finger.
“I am not going to buy a dress, Aunt Clara,” I said.
By two in the afternoon, we had moved the stack of nine blue shirts to the kitchen.
The oak kitchen table was old, its pine top marked by a deep, dark scar in the corner where my mother had dropped a hot iron thirty years ago. Clara sat across from me, her fingers tapping against a white ceramic mug of lukewarm chicory coffee she had poured but ignored.
“It is thirty-five miles to the department store in Fort Wayne,” Clara said, her eyes tracking the blue shirts spread out between us. “We could find a simple linen dress on the clearance rack. Something pale yellow. You would look very nice in yellow, Nicole.”
“I do not have the money for clearance racks,” I said, tracing the scarred corner of the table with my index finger. “And I do not want yellow.”
