Nobody at my mother’s funeral was dressed in white.
Except Dolores.
She came in ten minutes late. The organist had already started “Abide with Me,” and Pastor Lindqvist was standing at the front with his Bible open, waiting for the last of the stragglers to find their seats.
Then the big wooden doors at the back of Trinity Lutheran swung open. And every head in the church turned around.
Dolores Kaminski was standing in the doorway in a full wedding gown.
Long lace sleeves. A high lace collar. A train that dragged behind her on the red church carpet. A thin veil pinned into her short gray hair.
The dress was old. You could tell from across the room. The white had gone the color of weak tea, especially down the front. It didn’t fit her anymore, either. It pulled tight across her back and her shoulders. When she turned to close the door behind her, I saw the zipper. It wouldn’t go up the last six inches. She’d held it together with a row of big silver safety pins.
Dolores has been my mother’s best friend since they were nineteen years old.
They were roommates at the Mercy School of Nursing in Davenport, Iowa, in 1972. They shared a dorm room the size of a closet, with one hot plate and a radio that only picked up the farm report.
When I was born, in the middle of a February blizzard in 1980, my father was stuck in a snowdrift on Highway 61 for six hours. Dolores was working the night shift at Mercy that night. She walked into the delivery room, took my mother’s hand, and didn’t let go for eleven hours.
She’s the first person who ever held me. My mother told me that every single birthday.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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