One thing Dad kept coming back to, sitting at the kitchen table after his shifts: “I just need to make it to prom. And then, your graduation. I want to see you get dressed up and walk out that door like you own the world, princess.”
“You’re going to see a lot more than that, Dad,” I always told him.
A few months before prom, he lost his battle with cancer and passed away before I could get to the hospital.
I found out while standing in the school hallway with my backpack on.
I remember noticing the linoleum looked exactly like the kind Dad used to mop, and then I didn’t remember much for a while after that.
A few months before prom, he lost his battle with cancer.
***
The week after the funeral, I moved in with my aunt. The spare room smelled of cedar and fabric softener, and nothing like home.
Prom season arrived suddenly, sucking all the air out of every conversation. Girls at school were comparing designer dresses and sharing screenshots of things that cost more than a month of Dad’s salary.
I felt completely detached from all of it. Prom was supposed to be our moment: me walking out the door while Dad took too many photos.
Without him, I didn’t know what it was.
Prom was supposed to be our moment.
One evening, I sat with the box of his things the hospital had sent home: his wallet, the watch with the cracked crystal, and at the bottom, folded the careful way he folded everything, his work shirts.
Blue ones, gray ones, and the faded green one I remembered from years ago. We used to joke that his closet was nothing but shirts. He’d say a man who knows what he needs doesn’t need much else.
I sat there with one shirt in my hand for a long time. And then the idea arrived, clear and sudden, like something that had been waiting for me to be ready for it: if Dad couldn’t be at prom, I could bring him.
My aunt didn’t think I was crazy, which I appreciated.
We used to joke that his closet was nothing but shirts.
“I barely know how to sew, Aunt Hilda,” I said.
“I know. I’ll teach you.”
