It is not a dress anymore. It has not been a dress for years, not since the lean season when I needed new work clothes and my mom cut it off so that the empire waist bloomed into the peplum of a button-up blouse.

Rachel’s wedding was my eighteenth birthday and the dress was a style of that year: a baby doll shirtwaist, with cap sleeves and faux-glass buttons from the top of the collar to the hem of the too-short skirt.

It was a dress best worn with combat boots, which I never braved. I bought it fast, cheeks flush, and I wore it out onto the sidewalk and down the street to the coffee shop where all of the mothers had convened.

Only now does it strike me that this was a Sunday morning and all of us should have been at Cornerstone Baptist Church, a squat strip mall holy of holies. Rachel’s reception had been held there, but she married across town at Calvary Baptist, the red brick church where I was born and baptized.

We bridesmaids dressed Rachel down in the white linoleum catacombs beneath Calvary’s sanctuary, and when she was ready to take her vows, we accompanied her through the same maze of halls that I had walked on my way to the baptismal font.

It is hard for me to tell you who I was at eighteen: awkward, gentle, finally pretty and continually surprised by the symmetry of my own face. Rachel was six years older than me; I watched her like a sister and so her wedding became the standard by which I judged all others: the mothers slicing fruit for days, the bridesmaids’ Butterick patterns and teal fabric bolts; the bride’s gown childlike and glistening, hanging from the rail of a Sunday School chalkboard like a girl descending.

“She’s married into a real clan,” her mother said that Sunday morning, sated and relieved, seated among the other mothers at the coffee shop.

They traded observations of the Paris in-laws, who hailed from a Missouri town near our backwoods church camp. But I thought less of the matriarch or the phalanx of brothers and more of Rachel in her white gown, myself in my new dress. Its hem skimmed my summer-brown knees.

Now that new dress is a peplum blouse and I have found it here in Ghana, in the bottom of my humid suitcase. I shake out the wrinkled, rough acetate, which I foolishly thought would breathe in equatorial summer, and I fold it up as best I can.

My dad saw Rachel this week; he took her nephews up to Paris for the kind of funeral held only in hometowns: the wake, the meals, the matriarch and phalanx of brothers all assembled to remember Rachel’s husband who died, strangely, for no reason at all. She is a widow. The words are odd to me.

The church was full, my dad said, his voice crackling on the connection. We couldn’t even get through the line. I took the boys to the water fountain and then Rachel was there, too.

Did you talk to her? How is she? I asked.

She’s doing okay, he said.

I lay on the bed in my sweltering room, the fan flipping around and around. I wear a cotton, cap-sleeved shirt-dress that smells of the ammonia of my own sweat. My body sinks into the mattress with a lazy, intent weight, as if it is bound to fall.

This week I will dream of Rachel in her wedding gown, ushering her children through a crowd that is their father’s funeral. Now I think of the Holy of Holies and the veil that was torn from top to bottom. I remember how white and glistening her gown was, and I remember the pink streaks that slowly stained its bodice, bright trace of cheeks and lips that reached to kiss her on her wedding day.