Lorna Brekke had been waiting sixty-five years to win a bet, and she had her sister's best blue dress on to do it.
It fit perfectly. Of course it did. She and Lila had been the same size since the day they were born, eleven minutes apart, in the upstairs bedroom of a dairy farm outside Norskedal, Wisconsin, in March of 1942.
Lorna first. She never let Lila forget it.
She stood in front of the mirror in Lila's bedroom and turned to the left, and then to the right. Lila's blue dress. Lila's pearl earrings.
Lila's gold-rimmed glasses, which made everything a little blurry. Lila's silver brooch, shaped like a rose, that Sig had given her on their tenth anniversary.
Lorna smiled at the mirror. Then she made herself stop smiling, because Lila didn't smile like that. Lila smiled with her mouth closed, sweet and a little shy.
"You're overdoing it," Lila said from the bed.
She was sitting there in Lorna's green dress, with Lorna's silver hoop earrings and Lorna's red reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. She looked so much like Lorna that it was almost alarming.
"I am not overdoing it," Lorna said. "I'm being thorough."
"He's going to know."
"He's eighty-eight years old, Lila. He can't find his car keys."
"He's going to know," Lila said again, and folded her hands in her lap.
The bet was made on June 23, 1962, at Lila's wedding reception, in the basement of Hauge Lutheran Church, over a plate of lefse and a cup of egg coffee.
Lila had just married Sigurd Thorsen, a tall, quiet farm boy with big ears and a slow smile who'd been courting her since the county fair the summer before. They'd danced to "The Tennessee Waltz" in the church basement, and the whole room had sighed.
Lorna had been twenty and full of vinegar. She'd leaned over to her new brother-in-law at the cake table.
"Sig," she'd said. "I bet you a dollar you can't tell us apart."
Sig had just smiled his slow smile and said nothing.
"Lorna, don't," Lila had said. "You don't test a man."
"One dollar," Lorna had said. "Someday. When you least expect it."
Then she'd gotten distracted by a Lutheran boy from Westby named Arne Brekke, who'd asked her to dance, and whom she'd married the following year. And somehow, in sixty-five years, they had never gotten around to it.
Lila wouldn't let her. Every time Lorna brought it up, at Christmas or a church supper or a funeral lunch, Lila said the same thing.
You don't test a man, Lorna. And she'd change the subject.
Lorna had carried mail on a rural route out of the Norskedal post office for thirty-one years. She'd driven a right-hand-drive Jeep down every gravel road in the county.
She'd been chased by every farm dog in three townships. She'd been widowed in 2019, when Arne's heart gave out in the middle of a polka at the Sons of Norway hall, which was how he'd always said he wanted to go.
She was eighty-five. She lived alone in town, three blocks from Lila.
And in May, she'd finally worn her sister down.
It was the dollar that did it. Lorna had carried the same one-dollar bill folded in her Bible since the night of the wedding, a 1957 silver certificate with a blue seal, just in case she lost. At Lila's kitchen table, she'd taken it out and unfolded it and laid it between their coffee cups.
"Sixty-five years," she'd said. "I'm eighty-five. You're eighty-five. Sig's eighty-eight. If we don't do it at this party, we're never going to do it."
Lila had looked at the dollar for a long time.
"Fine," she'd said at last, very quietly. "But just this once. And if he knows, Lorna, you pay up, and you never mention it again."
"Deal," Lorna had said, and shook her sister's hand across the table.
The sixty-fifth anniversary party was on a Saturday afternoon in July, in the same basement of the same church.
The Lutheran ladies had outdone themselves. There were three kinds of bars, two kinds of Jell-O salad, Swedish meatballs in a slow cooker, and a sheet cake from the bakery in Viroqua with a photo of the wedding couple printed on the frosting.
Someone had hung blue and silver streamers from the ceiling pipes. A grandson was running an old record player in the corner, playing Lawrence Welk.
There were a hundred and forty people. Sig and Lila's four children, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
Half the congregation. All the cousins.
Only six people in the room knew about the swap. Lila's two daughters, Lorna's son, and three grandchildren who'd helped with the earrings. They'd been sworn to secrecy at the kitchen table on pain of no lefse at Christmas.
Lorna stood at the front of the room in her sister's blue dress, by the cake, receiving guests the way Lila would. She said "thank you for coming" with her mouth closed and sweet. She didn't laugh at anything. Lorna laughed with a snort, and Lila didn't, so she'd decided not to laugh at all, which was harder than it sounded.
Across the room, by the coffee urn, Lila stood in Lorna's green dress, holding a cup she wasn't drinking. Her lips were moving a little. Lorna couldn't hear her over the music.
Sig had gone out to park the car. He'd insisted, though his grandson had offered to do it. He'd been gone ten minutes.
Then the side door opened, and there he was.
Sigurd Thorsen, eighty-eight years old, tall and bent, in his good brown suit and a blue tie, with his white hair combed wet and his big ears and his slow smile. He stopped inside the door and looked around the room.
The whole basement went a little quieter. The six people who were in on it held their breath.
Sig looked at the woman by the cake in the blue dress. Then he looked at the woman by the coffee urn in the green one. His face didn't change at all.
Then he walked straight across the room, past the coffee urn, past his own wife, without even slowing down.
He stopped in front of Lorna. He leaned down, slowly, and kissed her on the cheek.