The manager’s name was Dot, sixty-something, and the wall behind her register — which I’d somehow missed in my panicked entrance — held seven years of Polaroids: couples who’d met in her store, each photo dated, each couple holding matching costumes.
“The discount’s real,” Dot said, ringing us up while Sloane and I stood flushed and cape-clad. “Twenty percent. Started it when my husband died — he proposed to me in a costume shop in 1989, in a fitting room, with two matching robot helmets. Least I can do is subsidize the tradition.”
The wall had forty-plus photos. Some couples returned yearly, Dot told us, capes and helmets and witch hats evolving into wedding attire in later shots. One photo, dated 1994, showed a young Dot herself beside a tall man in a robot helmet.
“That’s him,” she said. “Halloween’s the one night everyone’s brave. My store just… concentrates it.”
Sloane — vampire cape already on, collar up — asked Dot to take our photo that night. We’re Polaroid number forty-something. In the picture I’m mid-laugh, capes matching, Sloane’s hand at my waist, and Dot’s thumb is half in frame, which she apologized for and we refused a retake, because the thumb made it honest.
The party we “weren’t invited to together” was my coworker’s Halloween party — I’d been invited; Sloane’s plans had collapsed; we went as the matching vampires on ninety minutes’ acquaintance and won the couples costume contest against two relationships of four-plus years. The trophy was a plastic pumpkin. We still have it.
We went back to Dot’s store every October 30th after that — same night, same hour, new matching costume each year, new Polaroid on the wall. Year two: matching witches. Year three: matching astronauts. Year four: I wore the robot helmet. Sloane cried and pretended it was the helmet’s fault.
The proposal happened in year five, in the cubicle where we’d met — Dot in on it fully, having conspired with Sloane for a month. I’d been sent back for “one more fitting check” and found the cubicle wallpapered with our five Polaroids, Sloane in the corner holding two robot helmets, the same kind Dot’s husband had worn in 1989.
“Matching capes was a threat or a proposal,” she said. “You asked. It took me five years to pick which.”
Dot took the photo herself. It’s on the wall. Under it, in her handwriting on a label: “ROBOTS. FINALLY.”
We married in October, obviously. Dot attended in a robot helmet. The couples discount, she informed us, applied to nothing at a wedding, but she’d brought a gift: the 1989 photo of her and her husband, framed, with a note that said, “The tradition holds. Be brave every night, not just Halloween.”
The wall keeps growing. We check on it every year — new couples, new capes, new thumb-in-frame Polaroids. Dot says the store’s matchmaking record is “better than every app,” and keeps a running count on a chalkboard by the register.
Last we checked, it read: 48 COUPLES. 9 WEDDINGS. 2 BABIES. 0 REGRETS.
Our photo’s still crooked. Dot’s thumb’s still in it. We asked her once if she’d ever fix it.
“Not a chance,” she said. “That’s the whole thing, honey. It’s not the costumes that match. It’s the moment.”
