Gerry and I didn’t have kids though we’d tried. I’d lost those babies in the fourth month, the fifth month, the fourth month again. By then I was so exhausted by hope and disappointment that I didn’t want to do it again. Gerry didn’t push me since we had kids in our lives—he taught high school shop, tried to make sure nobody killed themselves with the band saw, and helped construct sets for high school plays. I worked at the fabric store and taught evening classes with titles like “Dueling with Double-Knits” and “The Art of the Zipper.” Harris, the high school drama teacher, recruited me to help with costume design since I had access to cheap (somewhat ugly) discount fabric. That job reminded me there were many ways to have young people in my life, even if losing three babies made me feel a bit…defective. Gerry would have said that was silly, and I knew it was true, but it was a worry I cradled just the same.

There were other things I didn’t tell him about my body that were even more personal.

We’d lived in our little house for thirty-three years, bought it after we married, and had loved and lost four dogs and three cats who were buried in the backyard. We hadn’t owned a pet in years, but sometimes in the kitchen I felt one of the dogs nose me in the back of the knee, or I saw paw prints in the slight dusting of flour on the counter after I’d kneaded bread. The cats loved jumping up there because I told them not to, but I felt a slight vibration, a hum in my bones, that I was almost sure meant the presence of ghosts.

Other times, I sensed that hum when I made dinner and figured it was the elderly lady who’d owned the house before us and passed away in the back bedroom. Occasionally I smelled a floral odor that might have been her perfume. She was probably wandering around since she’d lived here for so long. I wondered if I was sensitive to ghosts the way that other people were sensitive to pressure changes. That was how my grandma explained it when I was a kid. We were at her house working on a sewing project, and I kept rubbing my hands together because it felt like I had prickers in them. She asked what was wrong and I said wasn’t sure, but I had little needles in my fingers.

“I have those, too,” she said. “Don’t worry, it’s just the family ghosts. My parents and grandparents. They like walking around the house, but not everyone feels them.”

“How do you know it’s them?” I said, more curious than scared.

“Sometimes I smell my father’s pipe tobacco or Mother’s hand lotion.” She tilted her head. “It’s not dangerous, but you might not want to mention this to your mother.”

I nodded slowly but thought about ghosts all afternoon. Their presence could be a light hum, or buzz, or needles so insistent they almost hurt, but those moments made me alert. As I got older and more sensitive, sometimes the vibrations were so strong, I took Tylenol. When Gerry asked what was wrong, I said arthritis again.

~~~

The year we turned fifty, Gerry’s brother Dale died in a car accident. He was two years younger than us, and the cause of the crash was inconclusive. It was late at night, almost eleven. He could have been drinking. It could have been a heart attack. It could have been black ice. Regardless, Dale veered off the road and Gerry’s mother didn’t want an autopsy.

For weeks after the funeral and the avalanche of cards, casseroles, and Jell-O salads, Gerry went into the garage after work and pounded on the shelf he was building for my sewing room. Our mourning was harsh since Dale was only forty-eight and had a lot of room for living, though he’d been a loveable crackpot made more cracked by the war. He was drafted in Vietnam and went over to serve when he was twenty. Dale was stationed mostly in Thailand and worked as a medic, but saw nasty things in field hospitals. After he returned to the States, he trained as an EMT, drove an ambulance, had a succession of girlfriends, and was a rolling stone. On three-day weekends, he’d drive to Colorado and back just to look at the Rockies.

“I’m reading about how doctors are trying to help depressed people by manipulating their brain waves,” Dale told us at Gerry’s fiftieth birthday party, a low-key affair with friends and family. “I guess some folks are building brain tweaking machines in their basement to calm their nerves. Like pot, but without the same chemical effects.”

“They’ll fry their brains in other ways,” Gerry said since Dale would be the sort to build a brain tweaker in his basement, but Gerry called him up when he needed help with sets for high school plays. Gerry and Dale looked even more alike as they got older, and sometimes people thought they were twins.

After Dale passed away, I was sure he came to stay for a while and check on Gerry. My hands hummed most of the day, and sometimes they downright hurt.

“You could ease up a little, honey,” I muttered to Dale as I worked in the kitchen. “Don’t lean in so close.” I was still angry with him for leaving us early and under strange circumstances, but he was better at taking care of other people’s bodies than his own. I felt the gentle weight of an arm around my shoulders, and the needles in my hands softened.

“Thanks,” I said. I knew it wasn’t right to be upset with the dead, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. In the garage, Gerry continued his staccato ponding on my shelf.

~~~

Two weeks after Dale’s funeral, I found Gerry in our bedroom wearing one of my sweaters, a cozy form-fitting forest green chenille top. Gerry liked my clothing since it was more comfortable than anything in his closet of white button-down shirts.

“I don’t know what it is about your clothes,” he said when I sat next to him on the bed. “It’s not like putting on another body, but it helps me relax.”

“The sweater looks good on both of us,” I said, resting my hand on his knee.

The first time I’d found Gerry wearing one of my blouses, I was pregnant for the third time and having morning sickness. Gerry bought six kinds of herbal tea, bananas, rice, and cornflakes–anything I said might not make me feel ill. When I walked into our bedroom one afternoon, he was standing in front of the mirror and fastening the buttons on my long-sleeved magenta silk blouse.

I paused. “Burgundy would go better with your complexion.”

“It’s not just the color,” he said. “I like the fabric.” He glanced at me. I was still in the doorway. “This probably doesn’t make you feel any better.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I like that fabric, too.” I was also exhausted and hungry, and suggested banana splits for dinner. Food in the evening didn’t churn my stomach quite so much.

“I always thought you had good taste in clothing,” Gerry said. I’d made him change out of the blouse before we ate. “Wearing something soft helps when I’m stressed. Today the seniors were being assholes and chasing each other around with an electric drill. It was the kind of thing Dale would have done if we’d had extra-long extension cords.”

Now that Dale was gone, I wondered if Gerry was pondering that memory. I wrapped my arm around his chenille shoulders. My hands were still buzzing, but not as harshly. For now.

~~~

A month after Dale’s funeral, drama teacher Harris asked Gerry if we’d like tickets to the Broadway revue that his boyfriend’s theater troupe was staging at the Unitarian church.

“He said they’re unconventional, whatever that means,” Gerry told me. It turned out the troupe did a riff on Shakespearian gender-bending, with some men playing women and some women playing men. I’d known that, in Elizabethan times, women were barred from the theater and young boys had female roles, but I appreciated the equal-opportunity casting and the revue was excellent. The actors mostly pantomimed to recorded music, but their precision, expressions, and the attention to detail in their costumes and makeup was enough for me to tug Gerry backstage so we could thank Harris and his boyfriend for our tickets. When Harris introduced Gerry to his boyfriend as the head of construction, and me as a costumer for high school plays, his boyfriend cocked his head, grinned, and asked if we’d be interested in helping with the Conservatory’s next production.

Gerry and I glanced at each other, then nodded. This new project probably meant giving up our evenings and lives for a month and a half—we had no illusions about the demand of theater—but with summer stretching out in front of us, we needed that kind of immersion to distract us from our simmering, shifting, grieving selves.

“The Conservatory started about twenty years ago with a bunch of drag queens and gay folks who’d been high school drama nerds and wanted to stage community productions,” Harris explained. “Now we’ve got all kinds of people involved, gay folks and straight folks and folks from the university theater department.” He paused and lowered his voice. “The next show will benefit the AIDS care center in town. They always need more resources.”

Gerry and I nodded again. Those were difficult years, even though treatments for AIDS had been improving and more people had come out as HIV-positive, including athletes, singers, and actors. It was different from the early days when the disease had been known as gay cancer, but there were many rumors and fears buzzing around like wasps.

After the father of one of Gerry’s students was diagnosed with HIV—Gerry thought it was from a blood transfusion during an operation—the poor boy was bullied by some kids, but other friends clustered around him in the hallway and held up their fists.There were still reports of kids with HIV who wanted to go to school with their friends and had bricks thrown at their houses. I didn’t understand how the world could be so cruel, but that stigma persisted: people with AIDS were gay men, drug users, and degenerates who deserved to die, and the rest of the folks who’d been infected just shouldn’t associate with anyone else.

Since he worked as an EMT, AIDS was often in the back of Dale’s mind as he was exposed to bodily fluids that could carry the disease. He knew transmission wasn’t easy but protected himself.

“Sometimes it’s scary,” he told me and Gerry while we had breakfast in a diner down the street from our house. “You never know who you’ll meet on a run. Last year, I learned a couple of my friends had been infected. Both great guys, both dads. Far as I know they’re doing okay, taking their meds, and staying hopeful.”

He gave us a little smile and continued to scan the space behind our heads. Dale always did that in restaurants, sat with his back to the wall and looked past us. I figured he wanted to monitor everything in case someone needed help. He never let go of that instinct, which was probably why he was happy as an EMT. It was a place to put his energy. He was also the most functionally drunk person I’d ever met. I didn’t know how he maintained awareness after five beers, but I assumed it was practice and brain wiring since the tension never left his shoulders.   

“Another coping strategy from the war,” he told me with a shrug when I pestered him about the habit. “Don’t worry, I never get behind the wheel after more than two beers.”

I nodded grimly, not trusting those words. The best I could do was give him an older sister glare and hope his good sense would prevail through the haze of booze. 

I always thought he might die in a car crash.

~~~

The Conservatory met weekly at Carnation Place, a big old Victorian house owned by Murray, the guy who’d founded the theater group. At our first meeting, he greeted us at the door, a fellow whose brown hair was going gracefully gray around the temples. He had a comfortable middle-aged-guy paunch and I figured he was a little older than us, but he looked tired.

“Come in,” Murray said, opening the door wider after shaking our hands. My fingers were buzzing with ghosts.

“Do you know how old the house is?” I asked, glancing around the living room at people sitting on couches and a cluster of folding chairs.

“At least one hundred years, Sugar,” Murray said. “She’s got the cracks and leaks to show for it.”

“Older houses have character,” I said, “not unlike older folks.”

“We have more character than a Looney Tunes cartoon, and about as much sense,” said Murray. I decided I liked him.

Folks passed around copies of the script for their next show, a musical called Waiting for King Kong that was written by a couple students in the theater department. It was about two guys who meet in a park from the time they’re kids to when they’re young parents and older fellows playing chess. They slowly realize but don’t tell each other that they’re in love. They needed an ape costume for one of the musical numbers, but Murray said they’d probably rent one. The rest of the wardrobe wasn’t difficult—outfits for adult-sized little kids, sleek evening gowns for a dream sequence dance number, and alterations to other costumes from past productions. Tryouts for various roles would be the following week, then we’d start practice.

As folks chatted about the script, Murray introduced Gerry to the other people who did set design, and he led me to Jackson, the fellow who was one half of their costume department since he owned a sewing machine. Jackson had short brown hair that was thinning a bit on top, and the baby face of someone who was about thirty. He hugged me when I said I had a sewing machine and worked at a fabric store.

“I can get inexpensive material,” I said. “Maybe even free if it’s in the clearance bin and hasn’t sold in years.”

“You’re a godsend,” Jackson said. “With two of us on the job, we’ll be hot stuff.” He told me he had sewing parties to tutor people on machines and hand sewing, and he gave strict instructions when folks went to Goodwill to pick out dresses to alter for new costumes.

“We can make things smaller but not bigger,” he said. “We’re not magicians.”

“I wouldn’t mind hosting a sewing party,” I said, thinking about how I could rearrange the living room to fit another table. It sounded like the sewing classes I’d taught, and Jackson said it would be wonderful if he didn’t have to squish everyone into his closet of an apartment.

~~~

A week later, I held my first sewing party with nine folks from the Conservatory. They were younger people—a couple of them had just graduated from high school, and a couple more were in college or had full-time jobs. Jackson was probably the oldest. As we dumped cheese crackers and pretzels into bowls, he said he worked in housewares in a department store and earned his paycheck by being nice to people who were in a bad mood. Since I’d spent the past twenty-five years working with customers and fickle fabrics, I understood what he meant.

My new students were eager if a bit hesitant to pick up a needle and thread, since I said a few pricks were normal. We started on seams, sewing a tight running stitch and making practice pillows out of old fabric. I wanted them to learn technique before we examined their costumes and started measuring, snipping, and pinning.

“I’ve wanted to alter skirts for Gloria, and maybe I’ll be able to now,” said one of the just-out-of-high-school kids when I checked his work. “She looks better in bright colors than me, and is more confident on job interviews. Frankly I think she’s more intelligent.”

“Oh God, Eddie,” said Jackson. “You don’t give yourself enough credit.”

“Gloria got us the job doing phone surveys,” said Eddie. “I was glad they interviewed her over the phone for the position.”

“Phone surveys, eh?” I said.

“We meet all kinds,” Eddie said, “but Gloria is confident and patient. I hide her bracelets and necklaces under my cuffs, and put on the lightest shade of mascara, blush, and lipstick I can manage, just enough to give her a glow.” He frowned. “I hope that doesn’t sound weird.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said.

“Virginia would die if she had to go undercover,” said Jackson. “She’s too opinionated for her own good, but I can’t tone her down. That’s why she only goes to the bar on the weekends when she can be sassy and not care what others think.”

I smiled and remembered C. J., the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid. My brother was five years older than me, which left me playing alone or watching him in the backyard with his friends. When I went outside with C.J., he dared me to climb trees, hunt mushrooms, and search the garden for little toads. I was lucky that my mother believed dresses were for school and pants were for after school, even for girls. My brother had so many cast-offs, she just had to shorten the legs for me. I thought of them as my playing-with-C.J. clothes, but never considered that C.J. was part of me. Sometimes I thought of him still, imagined a fifty-year-old guy who’d gone into carpentry, become a history teacher, or worked in a gardening supply store and enjoyed hiking on the weekends.

I circulated the room, complimented the kids on their work, and told them if they needed smaller stitches or a wider seam. When Jackson and I thought they were ready, we examined the costumes and secondhand dresses they’d brought to alter. They changed in the bathroom, then I measured and pinned. Soon we’d covered the dining room table with snippets of fabric, but my students carefully continued pinning the hems I’d started for them.

Some wanted to take their projects home, but others asked if we could have another sewing party in a couple days since they were uncertain about their work. We didn’t have many evening sewing classes at the fabric store in the summer, so I agreed.

Jackson and Eddie stayed at the house until one in the morning, working on their dresses and telling me about Virginia, Gloria, and the mischief those ladies found on the weekends. When I explained C.J., they nodded.

“When I was a kid, Virginia only came out when I was in my room with the door locked and a couple of my sister’s old skirts,” Jackson said.

“Gloria and I make compromises,” said Eddie. “She prefers skirts to pants, but understands how we need to dress for the office.”

They hugged me before they left and apologized for staying for so long, but I told them I’d enjoyed the evening.

“The longer you’re in the Conservatory, the more it’ll seem like family,” Jackson said. “Even the part where it’s hard to get us out of the house.”   

~~~

When Murray asked if anyone else was interested in joining the chorus for the dance number, Gerry glanced at me and said he wouldn’t mind wearing a dress. I was fitting several other gray-haired guys for gowns, so it was part of the routine. After one of our sewing sessions Jackson gave Gerry a makeup tutorial, and helped him put on the corset, padded bra, and hip and rear padding he’d need to fill out the dress.

“I never got into this kind of construction before,” Gerry said as Jackson adjusted the little bags of birdseed he’d tucked in Gerry’s bra.

“How does that feel?” Jackson asked.

“Not bad,” said Gerry, “for few nights onstage–“

“Or on the town,” said Jackson.

“I guess,” said Gerry, smoothing his hands over the corset like he was sculpting his body. Maybe he was considering how my blouses would fit him with this revised shape. I often wondered if he wore my clothing more frequently than he let on since sometimes a blouse or two was slightly askew on the hanger, but I didn’t ask. I was a bit sad that he wanted to keep that a private matter, but figured he had reasons.   

When Murray said that Geraldine needed a dance partner, C.J. volunteered. I’d considered buying gray slacks and vests at Goodwill, and I had long-sleeved white blouses. With my hair slicked down and tucked into a bun, and wearing a fedora I borrowed from Harris, C.J. was ready to show himself to the world. It was much different from tree-climbing and toad-hunting, but I think he was happy to be back in my life.  

“You look good,” Geraldine told me after one of our rehearsals, before we went to the bathroom to change and wipe off the stage makeup.

“You, too,” I said, patting her cheek. Geraldine smiled behind her blush and mascara, which might have been a first. In my sweaters and blouses, she was usually quite serious, so it was sweet to see a grin.

At school Gerry had a reputation for being strict and goofy. One year for Halloween he’d dressed as an uptight librarian, shaved off his beard, wore a gray wig and one of my dresses, and went around shushing people. It was meant as a gag, but I’d always wondered if there was something more hiding underneath the silly facade. 

~~~

Nobody at the Conservatory spoke about the number of people they’d lost, but they’d said good-bye to many great actors, actresses, and stagehands. I heard stories about members during my sewing group.

“Some people come to meetings and productions even when they’re sick,” Eddie told me. “I think it’s one way to keep their spirits up and be with us. With family. We know who’s tested positive and we want to see them out in the world.”

“I never want to mourn someone before they’re gone,” Jackson said, “but sometimes it’s hard when you know what’s coming.”

“It’s hard when you don’t know what’s coming,” I said. “We lost my brother-in-law not too long ago, and Gerry and I are still recovering.” I paused. “Sometimes I feel like he’s around, letting us know he’s okay and curious about what we’re doing.”

Jackson nodded. “My cat died a few months ago, and sometimes when I fall asleep in front of the television, I wake up all the sudden when I feel a weight on my lap. She used to jump up there and start kneading my knees in the evening.” 

“When you lose someone it’s hard not to think about what comes after this,” Eddie said quietly. “After Rich passed away, I had all kinds of conversations with people at the Conservatory who felt like he was still around. I wasn’t the only one who smelled that aftershave he wore. Murray said the kitchen sponge didn’t want to stay in the soap dish anymore. He kept finding it on the counter, but Rich was obsessive about wiping up spills.”

“I’m sure he’s not the only one who still comes to meetings,” said Jackson. “It feels like they’re around in scents or little touches.”

My hands buzzed.

“Murray said he wanted to bury Rich with Rose’s favorite brooch, but after Rich passed away he couldn’t find it anywhere,” said Eddie. “The day after Rich’s funeral, that brooch appeared on Rose’s shawl. Murray said he’d checked the shawl ten times. Maybe the brooch got lost in the folds, but I think Rich wanted him to keep it.”

“Rich was sick for four years,” Jackson said to me, “but even when he wasn’t strong enough to leave that hospital bed in their room, he wanted people to come chat with him so he could feel like he was at the party.” He pressed his lips together, shaking his head. “It wasn’t easy to see him like that. You would have thought he was a different person since he got so thin, but it let us know how close we were to saying good-bye.”

It was difficult to know how to love people who were living on that edge. I wished I could talk with Dale about it. He was always dealing with the loss of patients he didn’t know.

“Some cases are a real gut punch,” he’d once told me, “like when neighbors find an older man or lady unconscious in their apartment, or when parents find their kid with a needle in their arm on the couch. We come in with the stretcher and there’s all these family pictures in the living room and my heart breaks.”

“Do you ever find out what happened, who made it through?” I asked.

“Usually I’m afraid to check,” he said. “The only time I did was when a guy hit a golden retriever. We only discovered it was a dog when we got to the accident, but we took her to the animal hospital. She licked my hand after I gave her morphine, like she knew I was trying to help. I called the animal hospital later. Turned out the dog had broken her leg but she’d be okay. I never bothered the ER about anyone. They were too overwhelmed. But usually I knew who’d make it and who we’d lose. I got a good feel for that during the war.”

“I don’t see how you could go from one job where you saw so much loss to another one with the same thing,” I said. “That would drag me down something awful.”

“Well, yeah,” said Dale, “it can and it does, but after you do it long enough it’s hard to imagine yourself with any other job. Even in the field when we lost guys—those were real hard moments when we had to carry their bodies to the chopper on a stretcher—there were times when I felt like their spirits stayed with me a bit. Patted my arm. Even hugged me. Maybe it was adrenaline, but when I felt that weight, I knew it was supposed to be reassuring, like I’d done what I could and it was okay, I hadn’t fucked up, it was just a bad injury. That happened a few times when I was an EMT, too, especially with older folks. I’d feel this brush on my cheek, or something breeze through me saying I shouldn’t feel bad about losing them.”

“But you felt bad anyway,” I said.

Dale nodded. “Just because I knew I couldn’t pull everyone back didn’t mean I got used to it. You needed that kind of hope to go on the next job. A short memory helped, too, but I was never as good at forgetting as I would have liked. It was too easy to end up haunted, but then I just took the ghosts out for a beer.”

He shrugged and smiled, another one of his jokes that was also terribly serious, but most of Dale’s humor was like that.

~~~

I don’t know if Gerry sensed that Dale was around the house, but he sometimes talked about his brother at dinner seemingly out of the blue. Gerry was the sort who’d mull over a topic for days, then start chatting about it like he was continuing a conversation we’d had for an hour.

“Dale told me he didn’t want to die young,” Gerry said one evening. “But if it happened, he’d be okay with it, especially if he died on the job. I don’t think he believed in caution, or even common sense, and I never understood that.” Gerry shook his head. “Some way to live. Maybe the war did that.”

I couldn’t guess, but knew Dale had a lot of ghosts. Ones from the war. Ones from his years driving into and out of traumatic situations where he found people balanced on that line between life and death. Maybe sitting on the edge made death more and less daunting since those boundaries were permeable. It was easy to slip from one to the other.

“I hope that doesn’t mean you welcomed the change,” I said to Dale after dinner as I washed dishes in the sink. That was what worried me most. Where could his mind have turned in those dark hours when he was driving? Even if he slipped into a space where the transition didn’t seem so bad…

“Just back off,” I said when the ache in my fingers got so bad I had to stop sudsing a plate and close my eyes until the pain sifted away. I was becoming more used to the constant thrum in my hands, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. Maybe the kids who came for sewing parties brought ghosts, but we all had webs of people who we’d lost that lingered around us with a net of love and curiosity. Who were we without the dead, the people who floated across the line between here and there and reached out to touch our shoulders?

“For a long time my grandma was the only person who knew about Virginia, but Grandma didn’t mind me playing dress-up at her house,” said Jackson. “She thought it was a hoot for me to wear her old clothes. She wore Grandpa’s jackets and we danced around the living room. She said Grandpa would have gotten a kick out of it, but he was a funny guy.” Jackson paused. “After my parents found out about me, they put my clothes and books and everything in boxes by the curb. Grandma took me in to live with her. She said I was still a good person.”

“At least you got your stuff,” muttered Eddie. “I slept on a friend’s couch and borrowed his clothes for a month until I saved up enough to get jeans and shirts.”

“Oh honey,” I said, shaking my head before I went to the kitchen to refill the bowls of cheese crackers and pretzels. Snacks and sewing lessons were all I could provide. It wasn’t enough, but Jackson and Eddie hugged me for a moment longer than they needed to when they left for the evening. I wondered how many people we were standing in for during those embraces. We were ourselves, and we were the beloved family and friends who were no longer with us but lived in our stories and could, for a second, be brought closer. 

~~~

I was surprised, and pleased, that Gerry invited a few teachers from school to see the play. He’d known Bob and Reggie for years and they always teased each other, but Bob brought bouquets of flowers for us and asked if we wanted a photo of Geraldine and C.J. after the show. C.J. had a faint mustache above his upper lip and Geraldine wore gaudy stage makeup, but when we had the film developed, I thought we looked good. Dapper, even.

The cast party at Carnation Place after the musical felt like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a reunion smashed into one. Like many family dinners, it was an overwhelming potluck of ham, lasagna, fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, garlic bread and corn muffins, potato and macaroni salad, watermelon and sweet corn, three kinds of cake and two kinds of pie, four kinds of cookies, and mint brownies. The only complaint was that the paper plates were too small and flimsy. Murray was already plotting the next show, a play and not a musical, but I nodded when he asked if I’d be on the costume crew. Gerry agreed to help with stage construction if it didn’t conflict with high school plays. Harris promised it wouldn’t. His boyfriend made sure of that. I wondered if Geraldine and C.J. would be part of the chorus, but they’d be available as needed.

The two of them couldn’t be out in the world that much, but sometimes Geraldine wanted to take a walk in the park, attend an outside concert, get ice cream, or relax at home, especially after a stressful week at work. C.J. never minded driving, or ordering ice cream, or lounging with Geraldine on the couch. When I felt Dale wafting around the kitchen, manifest in my hands as tiny pricks, I figured he got a kick out of us.

“We should have talked more, but I didn’t know what to say,” Gerry told me one evening while he make coleslaw and I shaped hamburgers for dinner. “Even when I worried about Dale, I knew if I said anything about those concerns, he’d laugh and tell me to go to hell. Maybe we should have gotten drunk together so I could’ve told him to get his head out of his ass and explain what was wrong.”

“I asked him that a few times, when he looked sad,” I said. “He brushed me off, but nicely. It stinks that only women are allowed to say honest things, like ‘I love you, asshole.'”

“Did you tell him that?” said Gerry, quirking an eyebrow at me.

“I might have after a couple beers,” I said.

“The asshole knew I loved him,” said Gerry. “At least I hope so.”

“Nothing wrong with telling him again,” I said. “I talk to dead folks all the time.”

Gerry nodded. “I figure everyone does. At least we still know more people on this side than this one. Nothing wrong with either side, but I like ours for now.” 

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”

~~~

Between plays I continued our sewing get-togethers since Jackson, Eddie, and other members of the Conservatory wanted to improve their skills and alter streetwear. Two of the guys who started attending were HIV-positive. They told me quietly about the diagnosis, said they would wear gloves and bring their own needles, and if I was worried about infections they’d understand if I’d rather they not come.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’re more than welcome.”

They grinned and thanked me, but sewing was one way to help folks keep going. They would finish this dress. They would be in the next show. That was the most important goal, but little precautions became normal. We adjusted to plastic gloves and separate needles, meeting those changes with a shrug since it was what we had to do to get along.

Some of the sewing group members sat closer to those guys in my living room and some sat farther away, but I was careful not to lean away when I bent down to help them. Sometimes I wondered if I overdid the welcome, hugged those kids extra tight while biting down on the words “I’m sorry.”

It was such a contrast, the long goodbye of illness versus the short one we’d had with Dale. I wanted people to let go of this side of life when they were ready, but many didn’t have that kind of luck. I didn’t know if Dale had been ready, but I flat-out asked him one morning when I was in the kitchen making coffee.

“I just want to know you were okay with everything as it stood,” I said.

A second later, I felt my glasses slipping down my nose. When Dale came over for dinner and we had dessert or a drink in the living room afterward, I’d often doze on the couch while he and Gerry talked. If Dale saw me start to drift, he’d tug on my glasses and see if he could pull them off. He never managed to do that without waking me up to find him grinning in my face.

“You’re still not stealthy enough,” I told him, adjusting my glasses to sit more firmly on my nose. It was clear he’d tease me no matter where he was, and maybe that was the best answer I could expect.

Dale had to embrace and ignore the reality of mortality to do his job. He kept a certain tension in his body, always waiting for a beeper, for the phone to ring, for the next crisis he knew would happen. There were many ways I hadn’t realized I loved him until now, but loving people meant living with the way they chose to steer their lives, and sometimes stepping to the side when you didn’t agree with them. Many of the folks I knew at the Conservatory had stepped away from their families, or their families stepped away from them. It was a kind of metaphorical death for some—they lost loved ones, friends, their sense of stability—which was another reason for them to come to the Conservatory, and for me to continue the sewing group. Those meetings gave them a routine, a goal, a sense of anticipation for the next show. We all needed something to look forward to along with our growing gathering of ghosts. My students had collected them too young, and even though it hurt, I knew our hands still tangled together.

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Copyright 2026 Teresa Milbrodt