The green dress cost $89, and Dara laughed at the tag like it had told her a joke about her. She held it against her sweatshirt in the mirror, turned left, turned right, and then her hand went flat against her stomach.
Three years of that hand. I know what it means before she does.
She went into the accessible restroom at the back of the department store at 2:34. It was a Saturday in Akron, five weeks before her 21st birthday, and I waited beside the fitting rooms holding the bag with the dress in it like a woman holding a coat at a wedding.
There was a woman by the door. Silver hair, quilted vest, a husband behind her clutching her purse to his belly. She didn’t go to the standard restrooms farther along the corridor. She stood there for eight minutes and looked at her watch twice, the way I look at a bus that’s late.
When Dara came out at 2:42, wiping her hands on her jeans, the woman stepped into the doorway and told her, loud enough for the jeans rack, that there was nothing wrong with her and the room was for people who actually needed it.
The husband called her Jolene. Jolene didn’t care.
I said that was my daughter. Jolene looked at my school district fleece like it was evidence and said I’d raised her to lie.
Dara held up the laminated card from her ostomy nurse, the one she keeps in her phone case behind a picture of our old cat. Jolene read half a line and laughed. “Anybody can print a card.”
So Dara unzipped her tote and held up the squeeze bottle and a sealed spare bag, one in each hand, and offered to demonstrate right there by the fitting rooms.
A girl who’d been folding shirts went and got the manager. His tag said AHMAD. He looked at the bottle in Dara’s hand for longer than made sense.
Then he asked Jolene to walk outside with him before she said one more word.
The Blue Bay
Jolene didn’t walk anywhere. Women like Jolene don’t walk when asked. They need it to be their idea.
“Outside for what?” she said. “I’m the one who was wronged here. I’m a customer.”
“So is she,” Ahmad said, and he nodded at Dara. Dara still had the bottle in one hand and the bag in the other, like somebody had paused her.
“Put those down, honey,” I said.
She didn’t. I didn’t blame her. If I’d been holding the only argument that had worked so far, I wouldn’t have put it down either.
Ahmad reached behind him, to the back of his belt, where there was a little black zip pouch I had taken for a phone holster. He unzipped it. He took out a squeeze bottle.
Same clear plastic. Same bent nozzle. His was older, cloudy at the bottom where the water sits.
He held it up next to Dara’s. I swear the two of them looked like a toast.
“Eleven years,” he said to Dara. Not to Jolene. To Dara. “Crohn’s. They took most of it when I was thirty-six. I still carry this everywhere because the one time I didn’t, I was in a Cracker Barrel in Mansfield.”
Dara made a noise I hadn’t heard out of her since before the surgery. A real laugh, from the stomach she has left.
“Oh no,” she said.
“Oh yes,” Ahmad said. “Don’t go to Mansfield.”
Then he turned to Jolene, and the friendliness came off his face like a lid.
“I’m the person who actually needs that room,” he said. “So is she. I’d still like you to come outside.”
The jeans rack had grown. It was the two women from before, plus the man with the half-raised phone, plus the shirt girl, whose tag said NOA, standing at Ahmad’s elbow like a deputy. Seven of us had heard it start. Nobody had left.
Jolene looked at all of us. You could see her doing math. A woman who blocks a bathroom door in front of a department store does it because she thinks the store is on her side. The store had just pulled a bottle out of its belt.
“Fine,” she said. “Hubert. My purse.”
Hubert didn’t give her the purse. He held onto it and followed her.
Ahmad looked at me. “You can come,” he said. “Your daughter can come or not.”
“I’m coming,” Dara said. She put the bottle and the bag back in the tote and zipped it, and I picked up the green dress off the carpet where I’d dropped it.
We walked through the store in a line. Ahmad, Jolene, Hubert with the purse, Dara, me, Noa. The two women by the jeans rack came too, pretending to look at handbags on the way, which is a thing I have done in my life so I can’t judge.
Out the front doors, the lot was gray and wet from the morning. Ahmad didn’t go far. Third spot from the door, under the blue sign with the white figure, sat a silver SUV.
There was nothing hanging from the mirror. Nothing on the dash. No plate with the little wheelchair on it. Just a silver SUV parked in the closest spot in the lot, and the stripes on either side painted blue.
Ahmad stopped beside it.
“Is this your car, ma’am?” he said.
Jolene’s mouth did the thing a bus driver’s mouth does when I ask why he’s at the depot twenty minutes early and the route sheet says he was supposed to be on Copley Road.
“Hubert has a bad knee,” she said.
“Do you have a placard for it?” Ahmad said.
“We don’t need a piece of paper to tell us—”
She heard it. You could watch it go into her ears.
One of the women by the handbags, who was now by the cart corral, said, “Anybody can print a card, right?”
Hubert’s Knee
I would love to tell you Jolene apologized then. She didn’t. She got bigger.
“This is harassment,” she said. “You brought me out here to humiliate me. I’ve been shopping at this store for twenty years.”
“You parked in that bay twice this month,” Ahmad said. “Noa saw the car last Saturday too. We’ve had a note on the register about a silver SUV.”
Noa nodded. She looked about nineteen and absolutely thrilled to be alive.
“I went in for TEN MINUTES,” Jolene said.
“She went in for eight,” I said.
Everybody looked at me. I hadn’t planned to say it. Nineteen years of dispatch, you learn the times stick to you. 2:34. 2:42. I had been holding them since the door clicked.
Jolene swung round on me. “You stay out of this.”
“You stood outside my daughter’s bathroom with a watch,” I said. “I’m in it.”
Then she started. I’m going to give you most of it because she earned it.
She said people take advantage. She said her mother was in a wheelchair for six years and every single time they went anywhere some teenager was in the big stall doing her makeup. She said she’s sick of it, she’s sick of everybody having a diagnosis, she’s sick of being told she can’t say anything. She said Dara looked healthier than she did. She said, pointing at me, that I dressed like a crossing guard and should be ashamed. She said her husband’s knee was real and that was different, because she’s not a liar, she’s just in a hurry, and Hubert gets tired.
“Jolene,” Hubert said.
“Don’t you Jolene me. You get TIRED.”
“I’m not tired,” Hubert said.
It was the first full sentence I’d heard out of him that wasn’t her name. He was holding the purse in both arms now, the way you’d hold a cat that didn’t want to be held.
“My knee’s fine,” he said. “It’s been fine since March. You park there because it’s close.”
The cart corral woman said, “Oh, Hubert.”
Jolene’s face went from red to a color I’d have to call brick.
And I’ll tell you what I wanted to do. I wanted to take the green dress out of the bag and throw it over her head like a sheet over a birdcage. I wanted to say the thing about her mother, about how her mother would be so proud of her, standing in the blue stripes of a spot she’d stolen yelling at a girl with no colon.
What I did was take out my phone.
“What are you doing?” Jolene said.
“Calling it in,” I said. “There’s a number for this. I give it to parents twice a year when they park in the bus lane.”
I know the Akron non-emergency line the way some women know their sister’s birthday. I dialed it. I said where we were, the third accessible bay at the front of the store, silver SUV, no placard, owner present and refusing to move it. I read the plate off the back bumper. I gave them my name. Melanie, two L’s no, one L.
“You did NOT,” Jolene said.
“She did,” Dara said.
Dara was standing next to Ahmad. They both had a hand resting on their stomachs, low, on the left. I don’t think either of them knew they were doing it.
Jolene grabbed the purse out of Hubert’s arms. She dug in it for keys. She was going to move the car before anybody came, and honestly that was the smart play, I’d have done the same.
Her keys weren’t in the purse.
“Hubert.”
Hubert put his hand in his jacket pocket and didn’t take it out.
Three Minutes
The officer took fourteen minutes to come, which in a Saturday lot in Akron is a miracle, and Jolene spent every single one of them telling Hubert what she’d do to him at home. Hubert stood with his hand in his pocket and looked at the clouds.
The officer was a short woman named Wrobel with a ticket book that had seen things. She looked at the car. She looked at the sign. She looked at the dash.
“Whose vehicle?”
“It’s registered to me,” Hubert said. Jolene shut her eyes.
“Placard?”
“No, ma’am.”
Officer Wrobel wrote. It took her about three minutes, and nobody in that lot said a word for all three. I counted them, because that’s who I am. The man with the half-raised phone had finally raised it all the way. I let him. Dara stood with her tote on her shoulder and watched the pen move.
Wrobel tore the ticket off and handed it to Hubert, who handed it to Jolene, who held it out away from her body like it was the bag in Dara’s hand.
Two hundred and fifty dollars. In Ohio they don’t play.
Then Ahmad stepped up.
“Ma’am,” he said to Jolene. “I’d like you to leave the store today. And I’d prefer you don’t come back. Noa will make a note.”
“You can’t ban me,” Jolene said. “I have a card. A store card.”
“Anybody can print a card,” Dara said.
That was it. That was the whole sentence. She said it the way you’d say “excuse me” to a person in the cereal aisle, and then she walked past Jolene back toward the doors with the green dress bag swinging from my hand behind her.
Jolene said something. I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening anymore. I was following my kid.
The Fitting Room Mirror
Inside, Dara went straight back to the fitting rooms. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t make her. I’ve driven her to enough appointments to know when to just keep my hands on the wheel.
She tried the dress on again. Over her jeans this time, sleeves and all, sweatshirt off, a plain black tank under it. She stood in front of the long mirror and turned sideways.
“You can see the bag,” she said.
You could, a little. A soft shape, low on the left, if you knew to look.
“You could see that before,” I said. “In the dress. In the mirror. You laughed at the tag.”
“I wasn’t looking then.”
That’s the thing they don’t tell you about women like Jolene. It isn’t the eight minutes. It’s the next three years of a girl checking mirrors.
I was standing there trying to think of something a mother says, and I had nothing, when somebody cleared his throat at the end of the fitting room hall.
Hubert.
He had come back in. Alone. No purse. His hands were empty, which made him look like a man who’d lost something.
“I won’t come any closer,” he said. “I just. Miss. I’m sorry.”
Dara turned around in the green dress.
“She’s been like that a long time,” Hubert said. “Since her mother. It’s not an excuse. I should’ve said something at the door instead of her name. I said her name eleven times in that store. I counted. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything else.”
“Okay,” Dara said.
“That’s a nice dress,” Hubert said.
“It’s for my birthday.”
He nodded. He looked at me, not long, and then he went back out, and through the window by the fitting rooms I saw him walk across the lot past the silver SUV, which was still in the blue bay, and keep walking toward the bus stop on the corner.
I’m a bus dispatcher. I know that route. The 14 comes every twenty-two minutes on a Saturday.
He sat down on the bench and waited.
Dara turned back to the mirror.
21
At the register, Ahmad rang us up himself. He scanned the dress, looked at the price, and pushed a button that took off thirty percent.
“Store’s policy,” he said.
“What policy,” I said.
“The one where I’m the manager.”
Dara took her phone out to pay, and the cat picture came out with it, and behind the cat picture the laminated card, a little bent now at one corner from being pulled out in the hall. Ahmad saw it.
“I’ve got one of those,” he said. “Mine’s from 2014. It’s mostly tape.”
He pulled out his wallet and showed her. It was mostly tape.
“Mansfield?” Dara said.
“Mansfield,” he said.
Five weeks later, on her 21st birthday, Dara wore the green dress to the Italian place on Merriman Road with her cousins and her two friends from the community college. She came down the stairs at home before we left and stopped in front of the hall mirror, the one by the coat hooks that’s been there since she was in a car seat.
She turned left. She turned right. You could see a soft shape low on the left if you knew to look.
She didn’t look.
She checked her tote instead. Bottle. Spare bag. Phone, cat, card.
“Okay,” she said, and zipped it, and held the door open for me.
For more tense family stories, read about a fight over a historic dam and a garage attendant who wouldn’t raise the gate while a little girl was in the hospital. There’s also a husband caught in the middle of a painful family confrontation.
