“Sasha knows everything about dresses.” The teenager flashes a big smile. “Let me go find her. Feel free to look around. I should be back in a couple minutes. Also, love your boots,” she says to me, and I look down and realize we’re wearing the same style.

Boots, short patterned skirts I made myself, and solid tops. My uniform when I’m not working.

I wear my uniform most of the time these days.

We wander to a shelf full of vintage pots and pans in army green and lemon yellow. They’re fifties kitschy and not my style on account of the fact that I have a hate-hate relationship with the kitchen. The oven detests me as much as I despise cooking. I swear, sometimes I think the stove plots my death since it overreacts every time I try to cook rice. What other explanation is there for the way the pot bubbles over?

I run my finger over the handle of a pot. “Unused,” I say, and the word tastes vile. “That’s the worst kind of adjective to assign to a wedding dress. Especially one like mine. No wonder I couldn’t sell it at the other two shops we tried.”

Courtney gives me a skeptical stare. “You tried shops that don’t carry wedding dresses.”

“Be that as it may, I don’t know if anyone wants a wedding dress that was never worn.”

“Of course someone does, and that’s why we’re here. This store specializes in reselling dresses, among other things. And just think, your dress will soon go to some other bride who’ll give it a good home,” Courtney says, ever the optimist.

The dress is the last vestige of my almost nuptials.

I’d returned all the plates and mixers, as well as the Keurigs (Ray registered for three coffee makers? Was he going to set up an underground Keurig ring?) and the two pasta makers (show me anyone besides a cook on the Food Network who even knows how to operate one of those contraptions). I sold the ring recently, and thank God my ex-fiancé had a mildly decent salary, because that little stone will help pay some bills for the next few months.

Which is a good thing, since I lost my job last week.

Yeah, that only sucked a little bit.

But it wasn’t my fault.

I take some solace in the fact that the newspaper where I’d worked for the last six years cut half its reporting staff, so it wasn’t personal.

Courtney wanders past the pots to a collection of vintage glasses, the kind with old-fashioned sayings sold at roadside hotels out on Route 66.

“You really think I should sell the dress?” I ask. “I’m not that bad off for money.” I force a positive attitude not just into my tone but into my entire musculoskeletal system, as well as the circulatory one too. “Maybe I could turn it into a cute little retro dress?”

She stares at me, one hand poised over an old-fashioned glass that says Sleepy bear lives here. The daggers in her blue eyes tell me a retro dress is an unacceptable answer. “No. You’re not going to wear it again as a cute little dress. That’s bad juju.”