Four hundred and forty-nine dollars, plus five point three percent sales tax, is four hundred and seventy-two dollars and eighty cents. Twenty percent down is ninety-four dollars and fifty-six cents. I had a hundred and twelve in my wallet, which was everything from my first check after the phone bill. I gave her ninety-five. She wrote my name on a pink index card in black ink, MARLO SHIFFLETT, and under it the date and the price and the deposit, and under that she drew twelve lines, one for each payment, and she gave me a copy and stapled the other one to the plastic garment bag, and she hung my dress in the back room behind a curtain where I couldn't see it anymore.
"See you in two weeks, my dear," she said.
She did. Every other Saturday morning for six months, before my shift, I drove Marcus's truck or got a ride with Destiny to Staunton and walked into Kibler's with thirty-two dollars and twenty cents in an envelope, and Mrs. Kibler took it out of the envelope and counted it on the glass counter over the tray of tiaras, every bill, and wrote it on the card, and initialed it, and I initialed it, and she said, "See you in two weeks." Once in February, when it had been a bad week, she let me put it on in the back room and stand there in front of a mirror that had a crack in the corner, and I didn't cry, but it was close.
That was the dress. That was what was in my arms on the living room rug.
I should tell you about Marcus, because you need to know who he is before he comes through that door.
Marcus Overholt is not my father. My father is a man named Jarrett who moved to Myrtle Beach before I was born and has sent me three birthday cards in eighteen years, two of them signed by his girlfriend. I have his chin and his last name, and that's what I have of him. My mother married Marcus when I was six, and we moved into his house on Paxton Road, a white farmhouse with green shutters and a porch that slopes toward the road. Hadley was born a year later. So Hadley is an Overholt and I'm a Shifflett, and for my whole life the mail that came to our house had two names on it, and one of them was mine by myself.
Marcus works for the Virginia Department of Transportation. He's on a road crew, which means in summer he patches potholes and flags traffic in a reflective vest, and in winter he drives a plow, and when it snows he disappears for thirty hours at a time and comes home smelling like diesel and road salt and sleeps on top of the covers in his clothes. He is a big quiet man with a short gray beard and forearms like fence posts, and he can fix anything that has an engine and nothing that has feelings, and he knows that about himself, and that's one of the things I've always liked about him. He doesn't pretend.
He never tried to be my dad. I want to say that clearly, because people assume things about stepfathers, good things and bad things. He never told me to call him Dad and I never did. He taught me to drive a stick in the church parking lot on Sunday afternoons when I was fifteen, sitting in the passenger seat of his truck with his arms crossed, saying "Clutch. Clutch. Clutch," in exactly the same voice every time, until I stopped stalling it. He taught me to change a tire on the shoulder of Route 250 at night with the hazards on and a flashlight in my teeth, because, he said, the people who get hurt on the shoulder are the ones who never practiced in the dark. That's what Marcus was. He was a man who made you practice in the dark.
When I got the job at Starlite, he started driving me home. I didn't ask him to. The first Friday, I came out at eleven-forty and his truck was in the lot with the engine running and the dome light on, and he was reading a paperback western with a gas-station hot chocolate in the cupholder for me. I got in and he put the book on the dash and said, "How was it," and I said, "Somebody threw up in a size nine," and he said, "Well," and drove me home. That was it. He did it every Friday and Saturday night for six months. In January when the roads were bad he drove me home and then went straight back out to his plow. He never once said a word about it.
He offered me money once. It was the week before Christmas, in the truck, and he said, without looking at me, "If you want help with that dress, you say so," and I said, "I want to do it myself," and he nodded and said, "All right." He never offered again. What he did instead was ask me, every Friday night, "How many lines left on the card?" And I'd tell him. Nine. Seven. Four. And he'd nod at the road like I'd told him the weather.
So I need you to understand that when he walked through the front door that Saturday afternoon, he was the only person in the world besides Mrs. Kibler who knew exactly how many lines had been on that card.