The Dress
My first husband left me the moment he found out I was pregnant. I have told that sentence to very few people over the years, because of what it does to their faces, the flinch, the reflexive sympathy, and I stopped wanting to watch people rearrange their expressions on my behalf a long time ago. But it is the truth, and it is where this story has to begin, because everything that came after was shaped by it. I was twenty four years old, sitting on the edge of a bathtub with a positive test in my hand, and when I told the man I had married he did not shout or cry or slam a door. He simply went quiet in a way I had never seen, and within a week he was gone, and within a month the papers had come, and I was alone with a growing belly and a life that had cracked straight down the middle.
So I gave birth to my daughter by myself, in a hospital room with no one holding my hand but a kind night nurse named Patrice who stayed past the end of her shift because she could see I had no one, and I named my daughter Lily, and I raised her on my own for the next eight years. I want to be careful here not to make those years sound like a tragedy, because they weren’t. They were hard, yes, the kind of hard that grinds you down in small daily increments, the working and the worrying and the being the only adult in the house when the fever spikes at three in the morning. But they were also the best years of my life, because they were Lily’s years, and Lily turned out to be the single most delightful person I have ever known. She was funny and stubborn and endlessly curious, and she loved fiercely and forgave easily, and every morning she woke up as though the day were a present someone had left for her specifically. I did not have a partner. I did not have money. But I had Lily, and for a long time I told myself, mostly successfully, that Lily was enough, that I did not need romance, that the door on that part of my life had closed the day my husband walked out and I was fine with it staying closed.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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