THE SECRET LIVES OF DRESSES
Erin McKean
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder and Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright Erin McKean, 2011
The right of Erin McKean to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN: 9781848942103
Book ISBN: 9780340993231
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For the generous readers of A Dress A Day: your kind comments and enthusiastic encouragement (and sometimes, your nagging) turned the Secret Lives into a real book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
I am overwhelmingly grateful to the following people:
My agent, Lisa Bankoff (and to Scott Gold, the Shameless Carnivore, for introducing us), my very understanding editor, Caryn Karmatz-Rudy, and her patient assistant, Amanda Englander (who didnt lose her temper even when I moved across the country without telling her), and my copyeditor, Terry Zaroff-Evans, who indulged me by using a dictionary I worked on as the preferred source for all questions of hyphenizationwhich is awfully circular, now that I think about it!and who made me realize just how often I use the word band-aid (all-lower-case, metaphorically). Id also like to thank Isobel Akenhead for her enthusiasm for the UK edition and for her hilarious tweets.
My sister, Kate McKean, who used her own considerable agenting and editing expertise to talk me down from several ledges and out of a couple of blind alleys, and her cheerleading skills to keep me going.
My co-workers at Wordnik for their support and understanding as I tried to finish a novel while running an Internet start-up; my in-laws, Rosemary and George Gerharz, for their understanding while I spent the entire Christmas holiday in their spare bedroom undertaking revisions; Vanessa Davis and Anaheed Alani, for letting me gossip about the imaginary Dora (just as if she were a real friend we had in common) through quite a few NYC restaurant meals; and my mother, Devon McKean, who kept saying Hurry up so I can read it!
And (most of all) Im grateful to my husband, Joey Gerharz, and to Henry Gerharz, the coolest kid Ive ever kidded, for indulging me with Saturday after Saturday and Sunday after Sunday. (Guys: lets go roller-skating!)
Forsyth, North Carolina, may or may not strongly resemble a hyphenated town in the western part of the state, but all the institutions and characters and any geographical, grammatical, spelling, punctuation, or other errors of fact or style herein are all mine.
Chapter One
D ora had a rhythm going, or if not a rhythm, a pattern, and it went something like downshift, wipe tears away with back of hand, sob, upshift, scrub running nose with horrible crumpled fast-food napkin, stab at the buttons on the radio, and then downshift again. That had been the order of things for the past two hours. The first two hours had been pure howling, crying so hard she almost couldnt see, but then it had slowed down, a torrent turning into a spitting rain. Still bad weather, but not impassable.
The cars ahead of her, shiny boxes linked like beads, stretched as far as she could see. Whatever was causing the traffic was as yet undetermined; it could be construction, an accident, the sudden declaration of a state of fascist emergency and its concomitant checkpoints and ritual presentation of papers. Or it could be that Dora had died, and that this was her hell, her punishment for all her white lies and petty sins, stuck driving in miserable traffic to her grandmothers sickbed forever, without a clean pocket handkerchief or even her iPod.
Her iPod was still jacked into the shops stereo. Shed left the coffee shop in a rush, throwing her apron at Amy, and run for the car. Didnt bother stopping at her apartment; what could she need more than Mimi?
Poor Amy, left alone on the Friday of Parents Weekend, with all the boisterous alumni leaning over the counter to tell her that they used to work in that same coffee shop, all the freshmen trying to sit a bit too far from their parents on the off chance that their classmates would take them for strangers, people coincidentally sharing the same table and the same nose.
Amy must have called Gary, or waited until Gary came in after the lunch shift and asked where she was, because there was a text on her phone: r u oj? Gary was usually too impatient to finish keying a text correctly. Dora suppressed the urge to text back, the glove doesnt fit. Gary wouldnt get it.
Dora was not going to think about her next shift now. Dora wasnt going to think about Gary, or the coffee shop, or anything that wasnt Mimi.
Another two hours of sobbing and downshifting, ignoring equally the deliberately pretty country roads near the college and the gantlet of fast-food restaurants along the interstate, until finally Dora was pulling into the driveway of the house on Yorkshire. She fumbled for her keys at the front door; it had been four years since shed lived at home, but the front door key of the little house in Forsyth never left her ring.
She turned on the hall light and shut the door behind her. Gabby? she called. Maybe she was at the hospital. But Dora barely had time to walk into the kitchen and drop her bag on the counter before she heard Gabby coming down the stairs.
Gabby! Although her apricot perm was fluffed up and her coral lipstick firmly drawn on slightly wider than her actual mouth, Gabby looked tired. And older.
Sweetie... Gabby folded her in a hug. I was just having a little bit of a lie-down. Want me to take you over to the hospital? You must have been driving for hours....
Oh, Gabby! Dora thought she would tear up again, but even the vat-sized drive-through Diet Coke she had drunk on the way down hadnt replaced enough liquids to make that possible. How is she?
Shes been better, honey, you know that. But the Lord will provide. Gabby usually talked about the Lord as if he were one of her neer-do-well ex-husbands, so hearing her put any faith in him at all was a bit of a shock.
I should clean upDora gestured to her bedraggled T-shirt and good-enough-for-the-coffee-shop cargo pantsbut I didnt bring anything with me.
Sweetie, thats never a problem in this house. You still have your closet here, you know.
The closet. Dora hadnt considered the closet. She had always had two closets, ever since she was a little girl. One was for her everyday clothes: the jeans and plaid flannel shirts of a nineties girlhood. The other was the closet Mimi wasfor lack of a better wordcurating for her. A combination wardrobe and trousseau, constantly updated as new pieces came through Mimis shop that she didnt want to (or couldnt) get rid of. Dora had raided it as a girl to play dress-up, and as a teenager for a prom dress or two. She probably hadnt looked in it since Christmas... or maybe even high-school graduation.
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