She stayed up until one in the morning letting out the sleeves and the hem of the pants. She did it by hand at the kitchen table, with her reading glasses on and a cup of tea going cold beside her. I offered to help, and she told me to go to bed.
In the morning, the suit was hanging on the back of my bedroom door. It was pressed. The sleeves were the right length. There was a little note pinned to the lapel in her handwriting.
Be a gentleman. Be home by 1. Love you. — Mom
The next evening, I borrowed my uncle Frank’s car.
My own car, a 2006 Corolla with two hundred and forty thousand miles on it, had been making a noise for a week like a bag of bolts in a dryer. I didn’t trust it to get across town.
Uncle Frank is my mom’s older brother. He lives two streets over. He has a 1998 Buick LeSabre the color of old mustard, which he’s owned since it was new and treats like a member of the family.
He handed me the keys in his driveway like he was handing over a newborn baby.
“Don’t touch the radio,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It changes stations by itself.”
“Why?”
“Because it has personality,” Frank said seriously.
“Okay.”
“Also, it squeaks when you turn left.”
“Squeaks?”
“Squeaks,” Frank said. “Like a shopping cart. Don’t worry about it. It’s been doing it since 2011. It’s fine.”
“Is it safe?”
“It’s perfectly safe. It just has opinions.” He patted the hood. “Also, if it won’t start, jiggle the battery cable. The left one. It gets loose.”
“Uncle Frank…”
“It probably won’t happen,” he said.
He clapped me on the shoulder.
“Have fun, kid,” he said. “Your mother says this is weird. Is this weird?”
“It’s a little weird.”
“Weird’s good,” Frank said. “Weird makes stories.”
I drove to Sheldon’s house that evening at six-fifty-five.
The car squeaked every time I turned left. There were eleven left turns between Frank’s house and Sheldon’s. I counted. It sounded exactly like a shopping cart with a broken wheel, a high, sad eeeeek that got louder the sharper I turned.
I prayed Georgia wouldn’t notice.
The radio turned on by itself halfway there. I hadn’t touched it. It came on in the middle of a Spanish-language talk show. I turned it off. Two minutes later, it came back on, this time to a country station playing a song about a man whose truck was the only thing that understood him.
I left it on. It seemed appropriate.
Sheldon lived in a nice neighborhood on the north side of town, with big trees and wide sidewalks and houses with columns. His was a two-story brick house with black shutters and a basketball hoop over the garage.
I pulled into the driveway. The car squeaked. I turned off the engine. The radio stayed on for three more seconds, playing the end of the country song, and then shut itself off.
Sheldon opened the front door before I’d even gotten out of the car.
“Brent!” he said. “You’re early!”
“Only by five minutes, sir.”
“Excellent! Excellent!”
He was wearing a sweater vest. I’d never seen him in a sweater vest. He had a digital camera hanging around his neck on a strap.
He came down the front steps and looked me up and down. Then, without asking, he reached out and straightened my tie.
“There,” he said. “Better.”
For some reason, he seemed more nervous than I was.
“Just make sure Georgia has a good night,” he said.
“I will, sir.”
“And if anything unexpected happens,” he added, “just stay calm.”
I frowned.
“Uh,” I said, “what kind of unexpected thing?”
“Oh,” Sheldon said. He waved his hand. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Right then, Georgia came down the stairs.
I could see her through the open front door. She was wearing a long dark green dress, with her dark curly hair pinned up. She looked a lot like the woman in the photograph on Sheldon’s desk.
She looked beautiful.
But the moment she saw me standing in her driveway, her smile vanished.
Sheldon immediately started taking pictures.
“Okay! Okay! Out front! By the hydrangeas! Stand closer!”
We moved closer.
“Closer! You’re not strangers!”
We were basically strangers. We moved an inch closer.
“Brent, give her the corsage!”
I’d bought a corsage at the grocery store that afternoon on my way home from work. It was a white rose with a little green ribbon. It cost twelve dollars. I’d agonized over it for twenty minutes in the floral section.
I held it out. Georgia took it and slid it onto her wrist without looking at me.
“Smile!” Sheldon said.
I smiled.
Georgia smiled too, technically. It was the kind of smile people give at the DMV.
Sheldon took about forty pictures. He took pictures by the hydrangeas, by the front door, by the car, and then by the car again from a different angle. Georgia barely said a word the whole time. She stood there in her green dress with her arms at her sides and looked like she’d been sentenced to three hours of accounting.
“Okay, Dad,” she said finally. “I think you have enough.”
“One more! One more!”
“Dad.”
“Okay, okay.” Sheldon lowered the camera. He looked at me. “Midnight, Brent.”
“Midnight, sir.”
“Have fun, sweetheart,” he said to Georgia. He kissed her on the forehead.
She let him. Then she walked to the passenger side of Uncle Frank’s mustard-colored Buick without a word and got in.
The drive was painfully quiet.
I turned left out of the driveway. The car squeaked. Georgia glanced at me sideways. I pretended not to notice.
“So,” I said, “are you excited about prom?”
“Sure.”
“Are your friends going to be there?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of music do you like?”
“Lots of kinds.”
I turned left at the stop sign. Eeeeeek.
Georgia looked at the dashboard. Then at me.
“It does that,” I said. “My uncle says it has personality.”
“Okay,” Georgia said.
She turned and looked out the window.
The radio came on by itself. A man was shouting about mattress sales. I turned it off.
Eventually, I stopped trying.
When we pulled into the Ridgeview High parking lot, it was packed. There were limousines lined up by the front doors. Kids in tuxedos and sparkly dresses were taking selfies on the steps. Somebody had rented a white Hummer.
I parked Uncle Frank’s Buick between a BMW and a pickup truck with a flag in the back.
I turned off the engine. I sat there for a second with my hands on the wheel.
“Well,” I said, forcing a smile. “I hope tonight won’t be too terrible. I guess your dad really wanted you to go to prom.”
Georgia didn’t smile back.
She opened her door, but she didn’t get out.
Instead, she turned in her seat and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Wait,” she said.
That’s when she told me her father hadn’t chosen me by accident.
And she showed me his strange message.
I stared at her phone.
Remember our agreement. Don’t make things too easy for him.
“Don’t make things too easy for him?” I read out loud.
Georgia nodded. “My dad wants me to make tonight difficult.”
“Why?”
“To see how you react.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“He suggested I complain about everything,” she said. “Make unreasonable requests. Be rude. Be a total nightmare. And then he wants me to tell him whether you lose your patience.”
I looked out the windshield toward the gym. I looked down at my grandfather’s funeral suit and the shoes I’d borrowed from my neighbor, which were half a size too small. I thought about the mustard-colored Buick with its squeaking left turns and its haunted radio.
“So,” I said slowly, “I’m wearing borrowed shoes and driving a car that sounds like a shopping cart because your father wants to test my patience?”
Georgia stared at me for a second.
Then she burst out laughing.
It was a real laugh, loud and surprised, like it had escaped from her.
“Pretty much,” she said.
“Does he know there are easier ways to annoy me?”
“Brent!”
“I’m serious. He could just ask me to reorganize the warehouse again. I did it in February. Took three weeks. He changed his mind about where the paper towels go four times.”
Georgia laughed harder. She put her hand over her mouth.
“He told me about that,” she said. “He said you didn’t complain once.”
“I complained,” I said. “Just not out loud.”
Then her expression changed.
“I told him I wouldn’t do it,” she said. “The whole difficult thing. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“Then why did you look so miserable back at your house?”
“Because my dad was standing right there taking forty pictures, and I didn’t want him to think I’d agreed to his ridiculous plan.” She shrugged. “And because I was annoyed with him. Not with you. Sorry. I should’ve said something sooner.”
“Then why are we here?” I asked.
“Because I still wanted to go to prom,” Georgia said. “It’s my senior prom. I bought this dress in February. And I thought you deserved to know what he was planning before you spent the whole night wondering why I was being horrible.”
I studied her.
“Planning for what?” I said.
Georgia hesitated.
“That’s the part I can’t explain yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to hear it from him,” she said. “It’s not my news to tell.”
I groaned and put my forehead on the steering wheel.
“Georgia,” I said, “you’re making this sound like I’m about to inherit a castle.”
She smiled. It was a real smile this time.
“No castle,” she said. “But you might be surprised.”
Inside, the gym was covered in balloons and string lights.
The theme was “A Night Under the Stars.” Somebody had hung hundreds of little silver paper stars from the ceiling on fishing line. They turned slowly in the air from the heat of the crowd. The basketball hoops were wrapped in white fabric. There was a DJ booth under one of them with colored lights that pulsed with the music.
It smelled like floor polish, hair spray, and too much cologne, which is exactly what every high school dance smells like.
I felt about a hundred years old.
Georgia grabbed my arm and pulled me through the crowd toward a table near the back.
“Come on. I want you to meet Madison.”
