There’s a garment bag at the back of the closet full of coats.

I always liked the black faux shearling coat. It’s very warm. But these days with the nearly weightless acrylic-down coats, this one is too bulky. And so is the brown one that’s a near twin. I found that one at a secondhand shop. The price was too good to pass up.

I have the two leather jackets I bought in Italy when I visited Molly in 2011. The buckskin-colored one was tight when I tried it on in the store.

“It fits you like a glove,” the salesman said. “And like a glove it will stretch.”

It didn’t.
I wore it for a few years and then grew to dislike the way it made me feel constricted.

The other jacket is a brown bombardier. It’s just kind of normal.

Both are more ornamental than functional. They aren’t going to keep me warm on my walks to campus. And so, they have come to reside in the back of my closet.

And then, there’s Carey’s purple leather coat.

I don’t know where she got it. The tag says it was made in Turkey.

The coat was stylish in the early 1980s. Or maybe she bought it in the 1970s.

I can’t remember WHEN I first saw her wear the coat. I just remember her in it, her thick red hair spilling over the wide lapel, contrasting the purple of the dyed leather.

The coat suited her.

It has wide shoulders—as was required of the era—that dropped softly down the shoulder and along the arm creating a strong but feminine shape. One button synched it at the waist on the inside of the coat, a second on the outside, making the coat essentially double-breasted.

The outside button fell off somewhere along the way. Now there’s just a lonely thread where the button had been.

The coat has deep pockets that end around the knees. Carey always had them filled with odds and ends: her lip gloss, loose change, chewing gum, and cigarettes.

The coat carried her panache along with her scent—Ciara! By Revlon.
Carey was effervescent! Always laughing.

I first met her at the horse stable where I used to go for lessons.

Carey didn’t need lessons. She was a natural horsewoman.

Later we attended the same high school, and we became fast friends, though we were as different as night and day.

I was as quiet as Carey was vivacious.

With Carey (on the left) 1973. Author’s photo

She was outgoing, generous, easy to talk to.

I was shy, and being in public with Carey meant that people were going to notice us. Or rather, her.

Men were naturally drawn to Carey.

She had a magnetism about her. She knew people watched her, and she sometimes took advantage of her powers by intentionally drawing attention to herself.

Being with her could be exhausting at times.

If we went to a movie theater, for example, she’d talk to all those around her, laugh loudly during the film—and often inappropriately—and flirt with strange men.

She drew me into her new friendships and suggest later dates or plans in which I had no interest.

We graduated high school and went to different colleges, but I still saw her over the summers. We spent time together, always surrounded by adoring men.

Carey married in the early 1980s to a very plain, quiet man—surprising us all. She told me she was settling down, and she did. She soon had two beautiful children, a girl and a boy. Neither inherited her red hair.

I lost touch with Carey when I left North Carolina.

Once she came to visit me in New York City, where I attended graduate school. I had to beg her not to look people in the eye while we rode the subway, not to strike up conversations. She struggled to be “inconspicuous.”

Occasionally, I’d see her when I returned home to visit my parents.

But even those visits waned.

Sometimes, I wouldn’t tell her I was coming back. I just didn’t want to get pulled into the whirlwind of energy she still managed to stir up around her. I preferred to spend time with my parents.

Perhaps that is why I never noticed that the whirlwind had ended.

The last time I saw Carey we met at an Arby’s in Raleigh on Hillsborough Street. Neither of us had much time. We agreed on a quick visit over mocha shakes and roast beef sandwiches. We split an order of fries.

Carey was uncharacteristically quiet. Her glow was gone. Even her brilliantly red hair seemed somehow faded.

Even so, I didn’t see it.

Her husband had been injured in a traffic accident some years earlier and wasn’t able to work. Her children were running wild.

“Now I know how my mother felt,” she said, referring to her children.

We had a bit of a laugh at that.

“You’re going to be all right!” I remember telling her—trying to imbue my voice with some of her earlier zest.

“You’re just going through a phase. It’ll get better.”

But it didn’t.

My mother called me a few months later, while I was working in Japan, to tell me that Carey had committed suicide.

I was too far away to return for the funeral.

Wearing Carey’s Purple Coat

Later that year, one of Carey’s friends—a friend she acquired long after I had moved away—sent me a box of Carey’s things, things she thought I might like to have.

The purple coat was in the box along with some photographs of Carey and horses.

I wore the coat once or twice, but I could never really carry it off. Not like Carey.

I can’t let go of the coat yet, though.

I will keep it awhile longer.