The dress shop had given Annelise a chair, a cup of water, and no useful instructions.
She sat beside a low table while Cecily changed behind a curtain. On her phone was a list of questions about hems, shoes, alterations, collection dates, and whether the dress needed a particular sort of bag. She had made the list during lunch, between answering an email about a payroll deduction and eating an apple she did not remember finishing.
“Are you ready?” Cecily called.
“Yes.”
“I meant is the woman back?”
“Oh. No.”
“Then you aren’t ready.”
Annelise put her phone facedown.
The assistant returned carrying a box of pins. She drew back the curtain, and there was her sister in a cream dress with narrow straps and a skirt that fell in one clean line to the little platform beneath her feet.
Annelise forgot her list.
“Oh,” she said.
Cecily looked at herself in the mirror rather than at her. “Good oh?”
“Very good oh.”
The assistant knelt to check the hem. Cecily stood still, her hands hanging awkwardly at her sides. In ordinary clothes she was always doing something with them: turning a pen, moving a cup, tucking her hair behind an ear before it fell forward again. The dress made her look both older and more exposed.
“Do I look like me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Because the first one had so much going on I looked like a centerpiece.”
“You would be a very opinionated centerpiece.”
Cecily smiled, then caught the assistant’s eye in the mirror. “That was the problem. I had opinions about every part of it.”
The assistant shifted a pin and asked her to turn slowly. Annelise watched the skirt move around her sister’s ankles. She remembered buying Cecily a cheap silver bracelet for her fifteenth birthday, certain it was exactly what she wanted, and discovering later that she had borrowed money to replace the clasp before she could wear it. Cecily had never told her. Their mother had, years afterward, as a funny story.
“Do you need me to check the collection date?” Annelise asked.
“We have it.”
“What is it?”
“The seventeenth of October.”
“That’s quite close.”
“It’s three days.”
“Yes. I just wondered whether—”
“It’s fine.”
The assistant said the alterations would be ready well before then, but they preferred to keep the dress properly stored. Annelise nodded and picked up her phone to add the date.
“And the shoes are these?”
Cecily looked down. “Unless I steal somebody else’s.”
“I meant are they definitely the height you’re wearing?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because if the hem—”
“I know what a hem does, Annie.”
The old nickname stopped her more effectively than irritation would have. Cecily used it rarely now. At fifteen she had shouted it through walls. At thirty-two she could make it an accusation without raising her voice.
Annelise locked her phone again.
The assistant finished measuring and left them for a minute. Cecily turned sideways in the mirror, then back.
“Do you think the back is too low?”
“No. Do you?”
“I don’t. Mom does.”
“Mom thinks anything below the shoulder blades requires a cardigan.”
Cecily laughed. “She offered me hers.”
“The green one?”
“The green one.”
“That would be a bold choice.”
For a moment they were simply sisters laughing about their mother. Annelise felt how much she had missed that and immediately wanted to secure it by saying the right next thing.
“Have you decided about the music?” she asked.
Cecily’s face changed slightly. “Mostly.”
“I could make a list of what still needs—”
“Please don’t.”
Annelise stopped.
“I didn’t ask you here to manage it.”
“I wasn’t managing. I was offering.”
“You’ve offered six things since I got dressed.”
“Four.”
Cecily stared at her.
Annelise looked down at the phone in her hand. “That wasn’t the right answer.”
“No.”
Outside the fitting room, someone laughed. A hanger scraped along a rail. Annelise could hear the assistant speaking softly to another customer, and she became intensely aware of how small the room was, how difficult it would be to leave without making a performance of it.
“What did you want me to do?” she asked.
“Be here.”
“I am here.”
“I know where your body is.”
That hurt enough to make her want to argue. She had left work early. She had rearranged a call. She had driven across town and found parking in a place where every available space seemed to require a different permit. The facts lined up neatly in her defense, and none of them answered what her sister had said.
Annelise put the phone inside her bag.
“All right.”
Cecily looked away, smoothing a hand over the dress. “I don’t mean you’re doing something terrible. I just wanted you to see it.”
“I do see it.” She stood, leaving the chair and the list behind. “The straps are lovely. And you look happy in it.”
“I am.”
“Then Mom can survive your shoulder blades.”
Cecily laughed again, less cautiously this time.
Annelise stood beside her in the mirror. They resembled each other most when they were tired: the same mouth, the same faint crease between the eyebrows. Today Cecily’s face was bright and concentrated. Beside her, Annelise noticed the freckles across her own fair nose, the chestnut waves escaping their tie, the gray eyes she had narrowed in concentration. She relaxed her face and looked at her sister.
“Would you take a picture?” Cecily asked. “For me. Not the family group.”
“Yes.”
She retrieved her phone only when asked, took two photographs, and showed them to Cecily. Her sister deleted the first because her eyes were half closed and kept the second.
“Send that one.”
Annelise did. The dress stayed with the shop. The picture went to Cecily. It was an easy task, completed without expansion.
Afterward they walked toward the parking garage. The afternoon was warm enough that Cecily carried her jacket over one arm. They passed a bakery, and she stopped at the window.
“I’m hungry.”
“You had lunch?”
“Yes. I am capable of becoming hungry twice in one day.”
“I wasn’t checking.”
“You sounded exactly like checking.”
Annelise considered denying it, then followed her inside.
They bought two pastries and sat at a narrow counter facing the street. Cecily ate half of hers before speaking again.
“Hugo wants to skip the receiving line.”
“Does he?”
“Yes. He says seventy people can speak to us without forming a line.”
“What do you want?”
Cecily turned toward her. “I want to skip it too.”
“Then skip it.”
“Mom thinks people will feel neglected.”
“Mom once spoke to an entire wedding party while they were trying to get into a car. I don’t think neglect is inevitable.”
Cecily brushed crumbs from her fingertips. “We’re trying to keep some parts because we want them, instead of because everyone says that’s what happens.”
Annelise took a bite to give herself time. She could have told her sister how quickly those decisions grew, how a marriage could become a long series of agreed arrangements without either person quite deciding to live inside them. But Cecily had not asked for a cautionary story. She was talking about her own wedding.
“What parts do you want?”
“Good food. Music we actually like. Enough time to talk to people. Hugo wants his aunt to stop telling him how to stand.”
“That may be beyond the venue’s control.”
“I said that.”
“What do you do after work?” Annelise asked. “When you aren’t planning this.”
Cecily looked surprised. “Walk, mostly. When I can.”
“Where do you go?”
“Usually nowhere interesting. Around the neighborhood. Sometimes Hugo comes, sometimes he stays home and enjoys not being asked to discuss school administration.”
“You don’t like the job?”
“I like it. I also like finishing it.”
Annelise nodded. Her sister broke another piece from the pastry.
“Today I spent forty minutes explaining why two rooms can’t both be used by three different groups at the same time,” Cecily said. “One of them suggested I was being negative.”
“About space?”
“About possibilities. Apparently walls are an attitude problem.”
Annelise laughed. “Did you find a possibility?”
“Yes. Somebody changed the time.”
“Revolutionary.”
“I thought so.”
It was a story Annelise might have missed by asking only what remained to be done for the wedding. She had known her sister’s job title, but not this dry, exasperated voice she used about rooms and adults who expected her to create more of them.
“Do you walk to get away from that?” she asked.
“Partly. I like not being responsible for anything except crossing the road properly.”
“That sounds good.”
“It is. You should try it.”
Annelise almost asked which day, how far, what route. Cecily was still eating, her shoulders relaxed at last.
“I might.”
“Wear shoes you can complain in.”
“I have several pairs.”
“I assumed.”
They smiled at each other. Annelise ate the last piece of her pastry and discovered she had actually tasted it: butter, sugar, the slightly bitter edge of the toasted crust. She had been so occupied with being useful earlier that she had scarcely noticed the dress until her sister made her stop.
“What about you?” Cecily asked. “Anything besides work?”
“I’m trying to work that out.”
It was an unpolished answer, and for a second she regretted it. Cecily only nodded.
“Tell me when you find something good.”
They watched a delivery driver wrestle a stack of empty trays through the bakery door. Cecily moved her bag out of his way. Annelise realized she had not checked her phone for nearly twenty minutes.
“Come to lunch on Sunday,” Cecily said.
“At Mom’s?”
“Yes. Hugo’s working part of the day, so it’ll mostly be us.”
“What do you need me to bring?”
Cecily gave her a look.
“Myself,” Annelise said.
“Excellent progress.”
“I can also bring bread.”
“You can bring bread if carrying something makes the journey possible.”
She smiled, but her sister’s voice softened.
“I’d like to see you when we’re not collecting, fitting, choosing, or paying for something.”
“All right. Sunday.”
“At one.”
“I’ll be there.”
They parted at the garage entrance. Cecily hugged her, one quick arm around her shoulders, and went down the ramp to the lower level. Annelise stood watching until she disappeared, then continued toward the stairs.
At the corner of the block, a community noticeboard had been fixed beneath the covered entrance to a small public hall. She had passed it twice already without looking. Now a bright blue sheet caught her eye.
COMMUNITY CHOIR. NEW VOICES WELCOME.
Below that, in smaller letters: Tuesdays, 7 p.m. No audition. Come and sing.
She stopped.
The photograph showed a group of ordinary people holding black folders, some smiling, some apparently waiting for the photograph to be over. There were no gowns, no raised stage, no person standing dramatically alone at the front. Annelise read the words again.
She had sung at school, then in a casual group during her twenties, until a change of meeting night had made attendance inconvenient. That was how she described it when she thought about it. Inconvenient. As if pleasure needed no more than a scheduling conflict to make its departure permanent.
She missed the feeling of singing with other people. Not being heard above them. Being one sound inside a larger one, making something she could feel in her ribs.
She photographed the flyer.
At home, she put her bag on the kitchen chair and opened the photograph before she could lose it among receipts and parking-space evidence. The email address was simple. She typed it into a new message.
Hello, I saw your notice about new members. I used to sing alto, although it has been a while. Would it be possible to come along next Tuesday?
She added a sentence explaining that she was not especially good, then deleted it. They had not requested a self-assessment.
She sent the message.
While a pan warmed on the stove, she looked at the photograph of Cecily again. Her sister stood straight in the dress, hands relaxed now, looking at something beyond the camera. Annelise remembered what she had been looking at: the assistant returning with a small cushion of pins, asking whether she wanted the neckline left exactly as it was.
Yes, Cecily had said. Exactly as it was.
Annelise sent her a message. You looked like yourself. Very happy self.
Cecily replied with a heart, then: Sunday. No clipboard.
She laughed and set the phone beside the stove.
The choir reply arrived after she had eaten. It came from a group address, signed simply by the rehearsal coordinator. She was welcome the following Tuesday, September eighteenth. They met in the hall’s side room, through the entrance beside the small parking lot. There was no audition. Music would be provided; she could try a rehearsal before deciding anything.
Annelise read it twice.
She had expected the answer to contain an obstacle she could consider carefully: an assessment, a waitlist, a requirement to know something she no longer remembered. Instead it contained a door, a time, and permission to arrive.
She put the rehearsal in her calendar. Then she typed, Thank you. I’ll come on Tuesday, and sent it before she could make being ordinary into a reason to stay home.