The Red Dress
Part One: Just the Two of Us
For the first twelve years of my life, it was just my mother and me.
We lived in a small yellow duplex on a dead-end street in Columbus, Georgia, twenty minutes from the main gate of Fort Benning. There was a chain-link fence around the yard, a peach tree that never gave a single edible peach, and a window air conditioner in the living room that rattled like a freight train every summer night. My mother called it the Beast. She talked to it. Come on, Beast, one more night, she’d say, slapping the side of it with her palm, and somehow it always worked.
I never knew my father. When I was little and asked about him, my mother would sit down on the edge of my bed and say the same thing every time. It’s just us, Mia-bird. You and me against the world. Then she’d tuck the quilt under my chin and tickle me until I forgot what I’d asked.
My mother’s name was Kathleen Reynolds, and everybody called her Kate. She was five-foot-four, with freckles across her nose and a rust-red ponytail she wore so tight it pulled her eyebrows up. She worked days as an EMT for the Columbus Fire Department and served in the Army Reserve as a combat medic one weekend a month and two weeks every summer. She could put in an IV in the back of a moving ambulance, splint a broken leg in four minutes, and make a box of macaroni and cheese taste like a restaurant meal with nothing but black pepper and a slice of American cheese melted on top.
She sang constantly. Off-key, mostly Patsy Cline and Reba, while she cooked, while she drove, while she brushed my hair before school. She laughed loudly. She cried at commercials. She never once in my whole childhood let me feel like we were missing anything.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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