The dress had been Keith’s choice. He had taken her shopping for it last spring, one of those Saturday afternoons that I had been grateful to have off, and he had sent me a photograph from the store of Katie standing in front of a fitting room mirror in a pale yellow dress with a full skirt, her expression the particular expression of a child who has found the exact right thing. He texted alongside the photo: she called it her twirl dress. obviously we’re getting it. I had laughed at my phone in the grocery store and texted back three heart emojis and kept shopping, and had not thought about the dress again until February, until the week before the dance, when I found it hanging in Katie’s closet with the tags still on it and sat down on her bedroom floor and held it in my lap for a long time.
She asked me to help her with it the evening of the dance, which she always did because the buttons at the back were small and her fingers were not patient enough for them. I stood behind her and did the buttons one by one and looked at her face in the mirror, and she looked at her own face with an expression I could not entirely read, some mixture of things that was older than seven and younger than seven at the same time.
“Mom?” she said. “Does it still count if Dad can’t go with me?”
I sat down on the edge of her bed. My throat had closed in a way that required a moment before speaking was possible. “Of course it counts,” I said. “Your dad would want you to shine tonight. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
She pressed her lips together in that way she has, the way that means she is considering something carefully rather than simply accepting it. “I want to honor him,” she said. “Even if it’s just us.”
I nodded. I did not trust my voice for anything more elaborate.
She handed me her shoes, the patent leather ones with the small bow at the toe that she had picked herself, and I knelt and put them on her feet and tied the laces in double knots the way Keith always did, because she had told him once that single knots came undone when she danced and he had never tied a single knot on her shoes again. She watched me do it and did not say anything, and when I stood up she reached for the small badge that had been sitting on her dresser since the dance was announced, the printed paper one the school sent home, Daddy’s Girl in pink letters, and she pinned it over her heart with the deliberate care of someone performing a small ceremony.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment. Then she looked at me.
“I miss Daddy,” she said. It was not a complaint or a cry for comfort. It was simply a statement of the plain and enormous truth, offered in the matter-of-fact tone she sometimes used for things that were too large for any other register.
“I know, sweetheart,” I said. “Me too.”
Downstairs, I gathered my purse and my coat and tried not to look at the stack of bills on the counter or the casserole dishes from neighbors that had accumulated in the weeks after the funeral and were still in rotation because cooking full meals had not yet become a thing I could reliably do. Katie waited at the foot of the stairs while I locked up, and then she turned and looked down the hallway for a moment, toward the back of the house, and I understood the look because I had caught myself doing the same thing in the same direction for the same reason more times than I could count. We both stood there for a second in the particular hope of it, the irrational and irresistible hope that is not belief but is not nothing either, and then I took her hand and we went out to the car.
The drive to the school was quiet. The radio was on low and it played a song Keith had liked, one of his old favorites, a slow song from before either of us were born that he had discovered in college and never stopped loving, and I watched Katie in the rearview mirror and saw her lips moving along with it. She knew all the words because he had played it often enough that we both did. I kept my eyes on the road and did not let myself cry, because I had made myself a rule about not crying while driving with her in the car, and the rule had held so far, and I needed it to hold a little longer.
The school parking lot was full in the way that school events are full, cars along both sides of the entrance road, clusters of fathers on the sidewalk in the cold blowing into their hands and talking while their daughters ran circles around their legs. I watched them through the windshield for a moment after I parked, the ordinary ease of them, the uncomplicated presence of it, fathers and daughters on a February evening, and I felt the cruelty of the contrast so sharply that I had to press my hand flat against my sternum for a moment before I could get out of the car.
I squeezed Katie’s hand as we walked toward the entrance. “Ready?” I asked.
“I think so, Mom.”
Inside, the gym had been transformed with the particular enthusiasm of elementary school volunteers: pink and silver streamers, mylar balloons tied to every available surface, a photo booth in the corner with a basket of props, a table with punch and cookies along the far wall. A disco ball hung from the ceiling and threw small lights across the floor where fathers and daughters were already dancing, little patent leather shoes and big sneakers moving through the colored reflections together. The music was bright and loud and the room was warm from all the bodies in it.
Katie’s steps slowed as we moved inside.
