The Dress

Sometimes all you need is a beer, a boulder to sit on, and a special someone

No matter how many times Cass stuffed the lace dress into the bag, she couldn’t get rid of it. Once, she raced back to the Goodwill donation drive-thru, pleading, “Excuse me, I forgot something!”

She gave up, taking it home and hanging it in the bedroom closet, a lonely ghost that wouldn’t depart.

It didn’t even look like a wedding dress. It was just a lace thing, with a scoop neck and no sleeves. When Cass wore it in 2013, she was twenty-six, with long, curly auburn hair.

She walked to “their” boulder at the lake to join Kent. Her friends gasped at her silhouette — muscular arms, an athletic woman’s body.

Despite the slip underneath, the sun rising behind her revealed her body as if she had nothing on at all, really.

Kent shook his head and grinned at the beautiful woman he called Cassandra. To everyone else, she was Cass — a woman with a quick smile who hiked mountains and worked a shovel as well as any man.

The previous year, Cass told him, “I want us to get married while I still have a little bloom on the rose.” He pulled her close.

“Let’s see if you have some bloom on you today, Cassandra,” he said, his hands sliding low on her ass.

When he kissed her, his lips were soft but the bristle of his mustache played around her mouth.

He loved to turn her and run his hands up her sides and hug her into his body, biting her neck lightly and pressing his body against her.

She sighed, remembering.

Two summers before the wedding, Kent and Cass stood on the dock at Lake Crescent, looking down at the blue-green water.

The locals said that people who drowned here became “saponified,” changed into buttery soap by the alkaline chemicals of the frigid depths.

“I can’t swim,” she said.

“You don’t need to. I’m here,” said Kent, staring at her with brown eyes. She felt her heart race. This water was deep.

“Just jump,” he said. “Do you trust me? Jump.” She looked at him, feeling her heart throb in her head. She took a deep breath.

Feet first, she plunged into icy water, down, down — -feeling as if her lungs would explode. She kicked wildly, afraid to open her eyes. Then she felt him.

From underneath, his hands found her hips, and he wrapped his body around her, hugging her torso with one strong arm.

She felt powerful legs kicking and fluttering, and she rose fast.

When she broke the surface of the river, she gasped and spun to face him. His face was right there, his thick short hair slicked back, brown eyes crinkled and smiling. He spat and wiped his face.

“Told you it would be okay,” he said. Her body tingled in the icy water, and she wanted him. He pushed her onto the dock, pulled himself up, and wrapped a towel around her.

Then they lay on the damp blanket in the hot sun and made love.

Cass and Kent got a small house set in the rain forest of the Olympic Peninsula, with five acres in the middle of nowhere.

With a few friends and family, she married him wearing the cream-colored lace dress and moss-green slip, and Kent wore a crisp white shirt with blue jeans.

They said vows they wrote themselves.

On weekends, they walked the path to the river with hot coffee or beer, depending on the time of day. A year passed, and they fell into the rhythm of happy marriage.

Then, he’d gotten called up for duty.

“Kent, no. Please, tell them I’m pregnant, or anything,” she’d begged, “We aren’t at war. This is crazy.”

“Cassandra. Listen, I signed up. It’ll be fine. I’ll be home before you know it. You knew I was in the reserves when we met, come on. ”

Kent paid the mortgage a year in advance, got his paperwork in order, and gave her the keys to his jeep.

At airport security, she couldn’t let go of him, hugging him tight.

“Come on, Cassandra,’ he said. “It’s going to be fine. I love you. Stop, silly!”

She backed up and stared him in the eyes, and said, “You come back to me, damn it. And don’t call me silly.”

Kent’s engineering degree landed him an officer position. He skyped her from Kabul each month.

“All’s well here, just too hot,” he said the last time. Sweat poured down his face, wetting his collar.

His outpost was nestled between mountain ranges, and considered a dangerous location. Whoever chose this site wasn’t in Afghanistan. Valleys were hard to defend.

It was midday in January of 2018 when Cass got the knock on the door. An army officer stood, his face serious. She didn’t even need to ask, and sat down fast on the willow bench she and Kent had made.

“We can’t say for sure,” said the officer. “Apparently the outpost was overrun by insurgents. We believe Kent was killed, but we’re unable to recover a body.”

“I don’t understand,” Cass said.

“We can’t say for sure,” he said. “Kent was on a scouting mission. Three others are missing too.”

And that’s all the information she had. It had been seven long months now. She pulled open the bedroom closet and took out the dress.

Their four years were precious to her. She laid the dress on the bed, on his side. In her top drawer was the moss-green slip Kent said was see-through.

She smiled to herself, remembering the wedding.

She tugged the slip down over her body and looked in the mirror. Not bad, she thought, considering she was older now and under considerable stress.

Keeping up the house payments was darn near killing her. Screw the bank, she wouldn’t let them win.

The lace dress fit beautifully. She smiled. Of course it still fit.

All she did was work and come home to take care of the five acres. Cass pulled her auburn hair out of the tight bun she kept it in for work, shaking it out and pulling it loose with her fingers.

She stared in the mirror just across from their bed, looking at herself. Cass missed Kent.

She thought briefly of Andrew, a guy at work.

Just last week, Andrew asked her out to dinner. She stood at her desk and looked down, blushing. He apologized.

“Sorry, maybe it’s too — “

“ — -It’s okay,” she said. “Let me think about it.”

Grabbing a beer from the fridge, Cass trudged down the dirt path to the river. She didn’t lock the house or change back into jeans.

Why bother? She might as well rip the lace wedding dress on blackberry bramble, soil the hem muddy brown, and spread the lace across dusty granite like an old tablecloth.

What did it matter now?

She got to their special rock and twisted the cap off the beer, and looked at the orange horizon, the sun sinking low in the sky. Minutes passed and the sky lit up with brilliant pink.

That’s when she heard — Cassandra.

She turned.

And there he was.