My daughter’s oldest friend came down the aisle at her service in her own red dress, the one I’d hemmed for her, and my husband came halfway out of the pew saying, “I’ll drag that son of a bitch out by his collar.” I hooked two fingers in his belt loop. Then the man reached the lectern and said she’d made him promise.
It was the last thing I’d ever get to do for Loretta, and Francisco was about to turn it into a fistfight ten feet from her casket.
He’s eighty-six.
Gus Kyriakos is sixty-three, same as she was.
Neither of them was going to win anything.
Gus and my daughter had been stuck together since second grade at St. Casimir’s in Saginaw.
He ate at my table more Sundays than my own nephews did.
By ten he was calling me Ma, and I let him.
Then one afternoon in 1979, Francisco came home early from the plant.
He found Gus upstairs in Loretta’s room wearing her prom dress, the yellow one, the two of them laughing so hard they never heard him on the stairs.
I didn’t see what happened in that doorway.
I saw Gus on our front lawn afterward, picking his shoes up out of the grass.
Francisco said, “Not in my house. Not ever.”
And that was that, for forty-seven years.
Gus never came inside again.
He’d pull into the driveway and honk twice for Loretta, always twice, and she’d run out with one arm in her coat.
Francisco would stand at the front window and say, “Your friend’s here,” like the word was spoiled.
Loretta never married.
When she got sick in February, Gus drove her to every treatment, two hours each way, thirty-one round trips in a Dodge with a crack across the windshield.
Francisco said that was the least he could do.
I never asked what he meant by least.
She died on a Tuesday in October, nine weeks after the doctors stopped.
So when Gus came through the doors in that dress, I knew it before anybody.
I’d put the hem up two inches myself, by hand, at my kitchen table.
She bought it for her sixtieth and never once wore it out of the house.
Now the side seams had been let out.
Somebody had done it carefully.
The Mak sisters from her office turned all the way around in the pew.
A man in the back laughed once and then stopped.
Francisco’s hand found the pew in front of us, and he pushed.
“Is that hers?” he said. “Esperanza. Is that LORETTA’S DRESS?”
I didn’t answer him.
“I’ll drag that son of a bitch out by his collar.”
He was halfway up when I got two fingers through his belt loop and pulled like I was starting a lawnmower.
“Fifty years I kept my mouth shut,” he said.
“You never kept anything shut a day in your life. SIT.”
He sat.
His knee bounced the whole pew.
The carpet in that place had little gold anchors all over it, and I counted eleven between my shoes and the aisle so I wouldn’t have to look at anyone.
Gus took the end of the third row, alone.
He never looked around.
He had a folded paper on his knees and both hands flat on top of it.
During the first hymn I leaned back to the older Mak sister.
“Did Loretta ever say anything to you about Gus and that dress?”
She had to think.
“Just that he owed her one,” she said. “She laughed about it. She said he’d pay up in front of her father.”
My stomach went right down into my shoes.
Deacon Bauer read the psalm about the green pastures, and then he folded his hands.
“Loretta asked that Gus speak,” he said.
Francisco turned his whole body toward me.
“She asked? When the hell did she ask?”
I didn’t know.
That was what scared me.
Gus got up.
The dress was the red of a stop sign, and it swung when he walked, and every head in that room went with it.
He set the paper on the lectern and didn’t open it.
He looked at the casket first.
Then at our pew.
Then right at Francisco.
“Mr. Valente,” he said. “The last time you saw me in one of her dresses, you put me on your lawn.”
Nobody made a sound.
Francisco’s hand closed on my wrist so hard my ring bit into the next finger.
“I’m not here to pick that fight back up,” Gus said. “I’m here because she called me in August and told me to bring a pen.”
He pulled air in through his nose.
“She was on your porch swing with the afghan over her knees. She made me write it down so I couldn’t weasel out.”
He touched the folded paper.
“She said, wear the red one. Walk it straight down the middle. YOU WALK IT RIGHT PAST MY DAD, and you don’t stop.”
Francisco made a noise I’d never heard out of him in sixty-five years.
“I told her NO,” Gus said. “I said ABSOLUTELY NOT, he’ll kill me in front of God and everybody.”
A couple of people laughed, the wet kind.
“And she said, ‘Good. Let him try. Then give him the other one.'”
He opened the paper.
There were two sheets.
The second was folded smaller, and it was her handwriting, I’d know it anywhere, she never closed the loop on a lowercase g.
“This one she wrote herself,” Gus said. “It isn’t for the rest of you.”
He came down off the step.
In her dress, past the deacon, past the lilies from her office, right down the middle like she told him.
He stopped in front of our pew and held it out.
On the outside, in blue pen, it said DAD.
Francisco didn’t take it.
“She said you’d try to make me read it out loud,” Gus said. “She said not to let you off that easy.”
Francisco stood up.
All the way this time, and I let go of his belt.
His hand came up off the pew. Was it going for the letter, or for Gus’s throat?
Blue pen
It went for the letter.
He took it out of Gus’s fingers the way he used to take his check through the window at the plant, quick, before anybody could change their mind. He didn’t look at the writing. He didn’t open it. He folded it once more along the crease she’d made and slid it inside his suit coat, in the pocket where he keeps his pens.
Then he sat back down, and the pew cracked under him.
Gus stood there with his hand still out, in her dress, with the whole room looking at him.
Deacon Bauer cleared his throat twice and said we would now pray the Our Father, and everybody grabbed onto it like a railing.
Gus went back to the third row. He walked it down the middle again. He didn’t stop.
I put my hand flat on Francisco’s chest, over the pocket, to feel if it was really in there.
He lifted my hand off and set it back in my lap like something I’d dropped.
“Esperanza,” he said, under the prayer. “I know what it says.”
The sewing tin
The tin is blue and used to have Danish butter cookies in it. It lives in the second drawer by the stove, and it has lived there since before Loretta could walk.
In 1972 I sat both of them down at the kitchen table with that tin and two old dish towels, because Loretta had torn the knee out of her uniform skirt again and I was done fixing it for her. Gus was nine. He asked if boys were allowed.
I said boys were allowed to do anything that kept their pants up.
Back stitch. Small. Pull it snug. No knots showing on the right side.
Loretta’s looked like barbed wire. Gus’s looked like a machine did it, and he made me hold it up to the window.
Francisco came in from the plant that night, washed his arms at the sink and looked at the towels.
“That’s women’s work,” he said, and laughed, and pulled out a chair for Gus at supper anyway.
Head of the table. Shoes off at the door. Grace before anybody touches a fork. That was his house. People at St. Casimir’s said Francisco Valente was a hard man but a fair one, and he ushered the 10:30 Mass for forty-one years with a crease in his pants you could slice ham on.
The tin is still in that drawer. Since 2019 it has shared the drawer with his magnifier, the kind with a light in the handle. His eyes went in the middle, where you need them. He reads the Saginaw News an inch at a time. Print he can manage. Handwriting he can’t. I read him his birthday cards.
At the cemetery he stood through the whole committal with his right hand over that coat pocket, like the Pledge.
Gus stood back by the Dodge in Loretta’s dress and a gray cardigan. He came no closer.
St. Casimir’s hall
The altar society had done ham buns, two kinds of potato salad and a tuna casserole with crushed potato chips on top that nobody touched all afternoon.
Francisco sat at the end of the long table with a plate he didn’t eat off. My nephew Rudy sat down beside him and stayed there like a fence post. Rudy is my sister’s boy, fifty-four, sells insurance in Bay City, and he has agreed with Francisco about everything since he was old enough to vote.
Gus came in twenty minutes after us. Every conversation in that hall dropped and then started up again louder.
He got a coffee and stood by the coat rack with it.
I asked Francisco for the letter. I said I’d keep it in my purse so it wouldn’t get bent.
“It’s not bent.”
“Francisco. She wrote it.”
“She wrote it to me.”
So I did the other thing. I turned in my chair and said, loud enough for the coat rack, “Gus. Come sit with us. There’s a chair.”
There was. The one next to me. I’d been saving it without knowing I was.
Gus started over.
Rudy stood up first and put himself between Gus and the table with his hands up, friendly, the way he does at a closing.
“Tía, don’t. Not today. Let him have today.”
Nobody was asking what I got to have.
The older Mak sister came over from the dessert table, took the coffee cup out of Gus’s hand and set it down. “I’ll walk you out,” she said, and she gave Rudy a look I hope he still feels.
Gus nodded at me. Just at me.
“I’ll be around,” he said. “I always am.”
Francisco waited until the side door shut. Then he turned to Rudy without lowering his voice.
“That Dodge’s in my driveway tonight, you call the police.”
Thirty-one envelopes
By six it was dark, and the Dodge wasn’t in the driveway.
It was across the street at the curb in front of the Pruitts’, engine running, the crack in the windshield catching the streetlight.
Francisco was in his recliner with his suit coat still on. He’d taken his shoes off and nothing else. I could see the corner of the letter.
I got my coat.
“Where are you going?”
“The mail.”
“The mail came.”
I went anyway.
Gus unlocked the passenger door before I got there. Loretta’s car pillow was still on the seat, the brown corduroy one for her back, and I sat on the edge of it so I wouldn’t squash it. The heater smelled like dust burning off.
Up close I could see the seams. Back stitch. Small. Pulled snug.
“Rudy’s supposed to call the police on you,” I said.
“This isn’t the driveway.”
He leaned across me and opened the glove box and took out a long bank envelope, fat, and put it on my knees.
“I was going to mail these back to him,” he said. “I don’t trust the mail with him.”
Inside were small white envelopes, the kind Francisco buys by the hundred for the collection basket. Every one said GAS on the front in his block capitals. I know those capitals. He’s labeled every freezer bag in my house for sixty-five years.
“He handed her one at the door every trip,” Gus said. “She’d get in and drop it in my lap like a parking ticket.”
“And you never said.”
“She asked me not to.”
I told him what the older Mak sister had said. That he owed Loretta one.
He laughed through his nose.
“She liked saying it that way around,” he said. “It was easier on her.”
I counted them on my knees under the dome light, twice, because my hands were cold.
Thirty-one. Two twenties in each. Not one had ever been opened.
The magnifier
When I came back in, the recliner was empty and the kitchen light was on.
Francisco was at the table with the magnifier out of the drawer and its little light going, and the sheet marked DAD flat under the glass. The blue tin sat open by his elbow. He’d had to move it to get the magnifier, and he has never in his life put anything back.
His nose was almost on the glass.
“Her writing was always no damn good,” he said.
I set the bank envelope on the counter behind me.
He moved the glass down a line, then back up. Her g’s. She never closed them. To him they’d be a hook, a mark, nothing.
He pushed the paper across the oilcloth to me with two fingers.
“Read it.”
“You said you knew what it says.”
“Read it, Esperanza.”
So I put my glasses on and read my daughter out loud to her father at the table where she learned her back stitch. This is how she wrote it. I’ve read it enough times since.
Dad,
You let Mom think it was about the dress. You let her think Gus was the problem, and you’ve let her think it every day since.
The yellow dress was mine. I put it on him. When you came up the stairs he stood in front of me, and you looked right over his shoulder at me, and you knew. I saw you know.
Then you put him on the lawn, because that was easier than the other thing.
He let you. I let you. He sat in the driveway forty-seven years so I could keep my room.
I don’t need the room anymore.
Feed him. At Mom’s table. You can say whatever you want about me after. I won’t be there to hear it.
Loretta
Francisco didn’t move.
The light in the magnifier handle made a little white circle on the oilcloth.
“Fifty years,” he said, and stopped there, and didn’t start again.
I folded her letter and slid it under the sugar bowl.
Then I opened the front door and left it open behind me, cold and all.
Loretta’s chair
Gus stopped on the mat.
He looked at his feet, then at me, and bent over and took his shoes off and set them against the wall, side by side, toes out. The way Francisco made them do it when they were ten.
Francisco was in the kitchen doorway.
“No,” he said. “Out. You get out of my house.”
I went past him to the refrigerator. The altar society had sent a dozen ham buns home with me in foil. I put four on a plate and into the microwave and stood there while the plate went around.
“Esperanza. I’m talking.”
“I hear you.”
“You don’t know what I saw on those stairs. She was sixteen. You think I didn’t know my own kid? I knew her before she did. And I had a choice. I could put one of them on that lawn or the other one. I picked. Forty-seven years she had a bed in this house and a key on her ring and her mother’s cooking. You’re welcome.”
The microwave beeped. I set the plate at Loretta’s place, the chair by the window with the cushion she tied on in February when her back got bad.
“Sit down, Gus.”
He stood behind the chair with both hands on it.
I turned the bank envelope over on the table and the white envelopes went across the oilcloth. Some slid all the way to Francisco’s side.
He looked at his own printing, thirty-one times.
“I paid him,” he said. “Every mile. That’s what you do with a man who does a job for you. You pay him and you don’t owe him nothing. You don’t sit him at your table.”
“In February you said driving her was the least he could do,” I said. “Least what?”
“He’s the reason. She never married. No husband, no kids. She had him honking twice in the driveway and her running out half in her coat. Least he could do was drive her to die.”
Gus’s hands came off the chair.
“And you cut up her dress,” Francisco said.
“Let it out,” Gus said. “Back stitch. Ma taught me. At this table.”
Francisco looked at the blue tin by his elbow like it had said something.
He reached over, took Loretta’s letter from under the sugar bowl and put it back in his coat. Then he picked up his empty plate and a fork and went to the door to the garage.
“Him or me,” he said. “Sixty-five years. Him or me at this table, Esperanza.”
I pulled out Loretta’s chair.
Gus sat.
Francisco stood in that doorway a long time, and then he said the last thing he said to me that night.
“That’s her chair.”
The Lions game
The last Sunday in November, the Dodge came up the driveway at a quarter to one and honked twice.
Always twice.
Francisco moved a space heater and a TV tray and the radio out to the garage the week after the funeral. He eats out there when Gus comes, with the Lions game on. The rest of the week he eats across from me and we talk about the furnace and his eye drops. Rudy hasn’t been by.
The letter is still in his suit coat, and the coat is still in the closet. I haven’t touched it.
Gus came up the walk with Loretta’s dress on a hanger in the clear bag from the cleaners. He’d asked me to take the seams back in. He said she’d want it right in her closet, the way she bought it.
“Your friend’s here,” Francisco said at the window.
He picked up his plate and went out through the kitchen, and the radio came on in the garage.
I got the front door open before Gus could knock.
“Wipe your feet,” I said.
If this one got to you, send it to the friend who always waited in the driveway for you.
For more family secrets and loyalties tested under one roof, read “My Older Brother Called The Police On Me In My Own Front Hall” and “My Mother Has Kept A Page With My Name On It Since 1963”. And for another buried family story that refuses to stay hidden, there’s “My Husband Swore A Dead Man’s Motorcycle Was Gone. It Was Behind The Snowblowers.”.
