“Vintage” was their own little inside joke, because Kimmy had bought the dress at Goodwill. “It’s all I can afford,” she told him. “I can’t imagine my mom taking me to the mall and dropping hundreds of dollars on a dress.”
They kept no secrets from each other, and he liked the way Kimmy had confided in him about all the ways her home life sucked. Her mother had never once attended a parent-teacher conference and had always considered the hours Kimmy spent in school to be a break from parenting her. For as long as Kimmy could remember, her mother had worked as a home health aide for an old man whose family didn’t want to spend the money to get him a real nurse. The man was disabled in some way and agoraphobic. He liked to play Chinese checkers and smoke cigarettes, which was convenient because Kimmy’s mom loved those things, too. The arrangement sounded all kinds of dysfunctional to Josh, but Kimmy said that as she got older, she realized how lucky they were because she feared her mother was basically unemployable in any other capacity. “My mom always said she couldn’t do the things other moms did because she had to support us,” Kimmy said. “I guess my dad was never in the picture.” Maybe things would have been different for Kimmy if there had been someone who’d believed in her before Josh came along.
Josh had offered to pay for any dress Kimmy wanted, but she wouldn’t hear of it. And the truth was that the dress was beautiful and looked like it had only been worn once. It skimmed her hips, and the yellow color looked stunning with her blond hair, which she’d left long and straight. All the other girls would be wearing elaborate updos, but even at Goodwill prices, Kimmy had blown her budget on the dress, shoes, and Josh’s boutonniere. Angie had done her makeup, and Josh wasn’t lying when he said she looked beautiful.
She did.
He’d met her mother for the first time on prom night, and that had gone better than he’d expected. Mrs. Keller was short on personality and warmth, but she wasn’t rude, and she shook Josh’s hand and told him it was nice to finally meet him. It seemed to make Kimmy happy that her mother had put down her cigarette and even snapped a picture of the two of them with an old camera Kimmy said she didn’t know they owned.
It was a different story at Josh’s house. His mother took loads of pictures of him and Kimmy, and several times she wiped away tears, because Josh was her youngest son and this would be the last prom. But when they finally escaped and were on their way to the restaurant to meet up with their friends, Kimmy was still talking about her mother and that camera. Josh was only eighteen years old and not very attuned to these kinds of things, but it was clear to him that night just how alone Kimmy must have felt growing up and how such a small amount of attention from her mother had affected her.
Kimmy had met Josh’s parents several times by then, and they were always so nice to her. They’d seemed a little dismayed when she told them she wasn’t going to college, but if they had an opinion about it, they’d kept it to themselves. They were still pushing hard for Josh to at least go to a trade school in the fall, but he remained convinced that working for a while was the best option for him.
Kimmy had decided she was ready to go all the way with Josh. They had come close several times, but Kimmy said she wanted to be sure. And when Josh told her he loved her one night when he’d taken her out for ice cream, he really wanted her to know that he meant it. They hadn’t been making out or anything. They’d just been standing in line holding hands when he bent down and whispered it in her ear.
They had discussed the matter of having sex for the first time, and Josh had booked a hotel room for after prom. The others were going to cram as many people as they could into another room, but Josh and Kimmy wanted their own space. They were both legally adults, and Josh’s parents had given their blessing, saying they’d rather the kids were at a hotel instead of driving around in cars. When they left Kimmy’s house, her mom hadn’t said anything about a curfew or even asked when she’d be home, but Kimmy had given her the name of the hotel anyway, just in case.
They didn’t stay at the dance long. It was lame and the only thing either of them cared about was going back to the hotel. The punch Kimmy loved was waiting for them in the room next to theirs, a big batch that a few of their friends who had skipped the dance had been tasked with making.
They had their own room, but they joined the others in the room with the punch. Kimmy downed half of her glass in three big gulps. “I love this punch. I love the way it makes me feel,” she said. She and Angie kicked off their high heels and jumped onto the bed, dancing along to the music, punch sloshing over the sides of their cups. There was nothing quite like being young and in love, and everything was going to work out exactly the way they planned.
It made Josh happy that Kimmy loved his friends. She’d also brought Angie into the fold, and Kimmy told Josh she never wanted to be without the garage gang, as she now thought of them. At their age, all that mattered was belonging to something.
“I just love your dress,” Cheyenne, Mikey’s girlfriend, said to Kimmy as she joined them in jumping on the bed. “It’s so gorgeous.”
“It’s vintage,” Kimmy shouted, and she and Angie dissolved into giggles as they hugged Cheyenne and the three of them collapsed onto the mattress, punch flying. Whoever had to sleep on that bed was going to be pissed off and soaking wet.
Later, when she was drunk, Kimmy told Josh she loved him and was ready to give herself to him. He was pretty drunk, too, but when he peeled her out of her dress and ran his hands along her naked body, she smiled at him. He looked at her like she was the most precious thing in the world, and he would never want to be without her. “I love you too, Kimmy. I always will.”
She said it didn’t hurt, but he wondered later how much she remembered of it. But then they did it two more times before checking out of the hotel the next day, and those were the memories of their first time that always came to mind when Josh thought about it.
When he pulled into her driveway, Kimmy said all she wanted to do was crawl back into bed and stay there until she’d managed to shake off her brutal hangover and feel human again. But before she got out of the car he said, “I love you,” and she looked at him and said, “I love you too,” and one of the few things he would ever be sure of in life was that they both meant it.
* * *