My Sister-In-Law Sent Me Around Back Before She Took My Room

Bich Tran made me carry the white skirts past the trash cans.

“Front doors are for guests today, Thuy.”

I had twelve ballroom skirts over my arm. Each had a new horsehair hem, stiff enough to float when a dancer turned. Rain had filled the pothole by the kitchen steps. I lifted the skirts above it.

I was a short Vietnamese American woman of forty-eight, with warm brown skin, a wide nose, and black hair streaked silver at the temples.

For twenty-three years, I had altered ballroom costumes in Biloxi, Mississippi. I could match thread colors from memory. Show me a faded red cuff at breakfast, and I could find its red at supper. People paid for that skill, though my sister-in-law called it “taking things in.”

Bich waited inside the Gulf Lantern Pavilion with six women from her benefit committee.

Bich was a slim Vietnamese American woman of fifty-two, with a smooth black bob, pale gold glasses, and nails the pink of shrimp shells.

She took a skirt from me and checked its label.

“These should have been here yesterday.”

“Your final fitting was yesterday.”

“We all make sacrifices.”

She smiled at the women. That was how Bich worked. Every room had an audience, and every person had a use. I had been useful when her brother Minh was alive. After he died, I became someone she could seat near the kitchen.

“Ladies,” she said, “we'll finally have a proper gift lounge. I'm reclaiming the sewing room.”

My room stood beyond the stage. It held two machines, a cutting table, and a window that faced a live oak bent toward the Gulf.

“When?” I asked.

“Friday. You never paid rent, Thuy. I let that slide for my brother.”

One committee woman set down her tea.

“Wasn't there an agreement?” she asked.

“Family arrangements,” Bich said. “You know how those go.”

I knew exactly how ours went. Nine years of it lived in a ledger with green cloth covers.

“I'll need that in writing,” I said.

Bich gave a little laugh.

“Always a receipt with you.”

“Yes.”

She looked annoyed that I had agreed.

I carried the remaining skirts to the dressing rack. At the stage, Lionel Dupre reached for half my load.

At sixty-nine, Lionel still moved as if the floor had asked him to dance. He was a Black Creole man from the coast, with silver hair and shoes he polished himself. He had taught three generations at the pavilion.

“Good morning, Mrs. Nguyen,” he said. “I see we're having a public foolishness.”

“Apparently.”

“Would you like a witness?”

“Please.”

We went into my sewing room. I laid my brass fish on the paper pattern spread across the table.

My father had made that weight from scrap at a boatyard. It was a mullet, blunt-nosed and ugly, with one crooked eye. It kept cloth still when my hands shook.

They had shaken often since Minh's death five months earlier.

“She told me he meant you to have nothing,” Lionel said.

I put my palm on the fish.

“He didn't have to leave me this place.”

Lionel waited.

“I bought it.”

Outside, Bich tested the microphone for her benefit lunch. Her voice filled the room where Minh used to fix the stage lights.

“Then why is she still giving orders?” Lionel asked.

“Her management term ends Friday at five. The closing allowed her thirty days to turn over the books and keys.”

“Does she know?”

“The closing office sent notice. I sent another copy.”

He sat down carefully.

“Grief can make a person tired,” he said. “It cannot make a deed disappear.”

The purchase price had been set in 2017, before new roofs and wedding rentals raised prices along our stretch of coast. Bich needed work done and cash coming in. I needed a place that no landlord could take from me.

Minh had helped us carry the table inside. But the agreement had my name on it.

At noon, Bich slid an envelope under my door.

VACATE BY FRIDAY, she had written above a list of things I could take. My machines were listed. My cutting table was not.

Below that, she added: Minh's death ended any special permission.

I photographed both pages.

Then I called Ruth Ellis, the lawyer who had handled my purchase.

“She wants my room,” I said.

“Bring the notice tomorrow. Bring your ledger.”

“She's telling people I paid nothing.”

“The closing file can answer that.”

I set Bich's envelope beneath the brass fish. Outside my window, wet oak leaves tapped the glass. I finished the last skirt, counted my stitches, and charged the full $95 alteration fee.

At three, a delivery driver came through the front door carrying an envelope from the closing office.

Inside was my recorded deed and a copy of a page headed SELLER'S ACKNOWLEDGMENT, with Bich's signature across the bottom.