The Green Dress

Leszek Wrobel opens the front door of the farmhouse before you can knock. He's sixty, built like a refrigerator, with a mustache that looks like it pays its own taxes and reading glasses hanging on a cord around his neck.

"She's been up there two hours," he says. "Swearing."

"At what?"

"At a zipper. At a shoe. At God." He steps aside to let you into the front hall, then thinks better of it and steps back to block you. "You stay here. You wait. And whatever you say when she comes down, kid, you think about it first."

"I always think about it first."

Leszek looks at you for a long moment with his machinist's eyes, the ones that can tell a thousandth of an inch by feel. "No," he says. "You don't."

He goes back to his recliner and his baseball game, and you stand in the hallway under the photo of Jo's mom, Bozena, laughing on a tractor in 1994, and you wait.

You hear her before you see her. A door upstairs, a muttered word that would get her thrown out of church, then heels on the stairs. Uneven. Careful. Jo has never in her life walked carefully.

Then she comes around the landing, and you forget how to stand.

The dress is green. Dark green, like the river under the bridge at dusk, and it's the kind of fabric that moves a half-second after she does. It leaves her shoulders bare. You have seen Jo's shoulders a thousand times, in tank tops, sunburned, smeared with grease. You have never seen them like this. Her hair is down. You didn't know it went that far down. It's honey-colored and it falls in loose waves almost to the middle of her back, and somebody has done something to her eyes so the gray-green in them looks lit from behind.

She stops three steps from the bottom, one hand white-knuckled on the banister.

"Well, Ethan?" she says.

You open your mouth. Nothing comes out. You close it.

"You swore," she says. "On the Mutt."

"I'm not laughing."

"Your face is doing something."

"My face is—" You actually don't know what your face is doing. "Ready?"

Something flickers across her expression and is gone. "Yeah," she says. "Let's go sweet-talk a geezer."

The gala is in a white tent in the infield of Riverbend Speedway, string lights looped from the grandstand to the flagpole, a bluegrass band on a hay-bale stage, a bar made out of two sawhorses and an old garage door. The whole town is here. Half of them turn around when Jo walks in.

You notice it the way you'd notice a tire going soft: slowly, then all at once. The bartender stops pouring. Two guys from the volunteer fire department elbow each other. Mr. Kuchar from the hardware store, who is seventy-four, actually takes his hat off.

"Why's everybody staring?" Jo mutters.

"I don't know," you say, and you realize, standing there in the dust and string light, that you're lying, and you don't know when you started.

Fausto Pazdernik is at the center table with a cigar he will never light, holding court. Dax Burgoyne is already next to him, one hand on the old man's shoulder, laughing too loud.

"Great," Jo says. "The vulture's in the nest."

"I'll take Fausto. You take the bank."

"I don't know how to take a bank."

"Smile at them."

She gives you a look that could strip paint. Then she squares her bare shoulders and walks over to the First Riverbank table like she's walking into a fistfight, and three men stand up to give her a chair.

You get exactly four minutes with Fausto. You tell him about the lift and the hours and the price, and he nods and chews his cigar and says, "You're Leszek's boy's friend. The one who welded the cow."

"The cow was a lawn-mower deck."

"It looked like a cow." He grins. "I liked the cow."

Then Dax is there, sliding into the conversation like a car into a parking space he's already decided is his, and Fausto is laughing at something about the grandstand roof, and you've lost him.

"He's good, isn't he?" says a voice at your elbow. "Dax. He's very good."

She's about your age, in a red dress that fits like it was poured, glossy dark bob, red nails, a smile that knows exactly what it's doing. She holds out a hand.

"Trina Banik. Marketing. Burgoyne."

"So you made the crying wrench."

She laughs. It's a real laugh, surprised out of her. "Guilty. It tested very well with focus groups." She hands you one of the two drinks she's holding, as if she brought it for you, which she probably did. "You're cuter than the file said."

"There's a file?"

"There's always a file." She clinks her glass against yours. "Relax. I'm off the clock. I just wanted to meet the guy who's making my boss lose sleep."

You're about to ask what else the file says when the band shifts into something slow, and you look up, and Jo is dancing.

He's tall, dark curls, a dimple you can see from across the tent, a sunburn that somehow makes him look like he's in an ad for being outdoors. Nash Ondrejka. Runs a sprint car at Riverbend on Fridays and roofs houses the rest of the week. Every woman under fifty in Cobb's Crossing has a crush on Nash Ondrejka. You've never thought about it one way or the other.

You're thinking about it now. His hand is on her bare back. She's laughing at something he said.

Over his shoulder, she looks at you.

"Oh," Trina says softly, following your eyes. "Oh, that's interesting."

At eleven the band packs up and you find Jo in the gravel lot under the floodlights, barefoot, heels dangling from two fingers.

"My feet are going to file a lawsuit," she says. "How'd you do with Fausto?"

"Dax happened."

"Dax always happens." She leans on your truck. The floodlight puts a ring of gold around her hair. "Bank lady liked me. Said she'd look at our numbers again next week."

"That's great, Jo."

"Yeah." She's quiet for a second. Then she turns her head and looks at you directly, and her voice changes. "So? Say it."

"Say what?"

"Whatever you've been not saying all night. You've been looking at me like I'm a part that came in the wrong box." She swallows. "Just say it, Ethan."

Your heart is doing something stupid. Your mouth, which has always been faster than your heart, gets there first.

"You clean up okay, Wrobel."

For a second nothing happens. Then something in her face closes, quietly, like a hood coming down.

"Thanks," she says. "Co."

She doesn't talk on the drive home. She looks out the window at the dark fields going by, holding her shoes in her lap. When you pull up to the farmhouse, she gets out before the truck has fully stopped, says "night," and goes inside without looking back.

You drive home. You sit on the edge of your bed in your apartment over the hardware store, still in your one good shirt, staring at the wall.

Your phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Jo.