She had no idea why she'd put on her red party dress this morning. It was cold, it was overcast, and she had nowhere special to go. Still, when she'd awakened this morning, the thought that made her want to get up was not any of these:
- You have the entire day to yourself
- You deserve to do something fun
it was:
- You love the way you look in that dress.
So, on an autumn morning indistinguishable from the days that proceeded and would follow it, Sal was wearing her red silk dress, a natty trench coat, dutifully applied makeup (you don't go out in a dress this nice without some sort of cosmetic assistance), and her favorite faux-combat rainboots.
If she had cared at all what the people who saw her thought, she'd laugh at their assumptions about the black foreigner who looked so dressed up at 10 in the morning. Sal was so used to the stares she received here, which weren't as brief or as benign as she'd assumed they would be, and didn't trouble herself to ask why.
Nobody here knew that it was mere weeks after the death of Sal's Chinese-American husband, and that she could not bear to leave the last place she'd lived with him, no matter how lit