For the smallest moment, something moved in Dana's face. Not guilt. Something more like annoyance, the look of someone who has been caught out on a technicality.
"Don't take that tone with me."
"You put a bucket on it so it would stay under."
"I said don't." Dana set the coffee down on the dryer, next to the empty jug of Clorox, and folded her arms. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its warmth entirely. It was the voice she used when the two of them were alone in the house and nobody else was ever going to hear it. "Let me tell you something, since we're being honest. You were never going to that dance. I don't know what fantasy you had going on with your grandmother, sewing away in that little house, but I'm not letting you walk into that gym tonight in some sad homemade costume and make this family look like a charity case. Not on Kenzie's night. Not in front of everyone. Do you understand me? People talk in this town. People already talk."
"Dad said I could go. I told him. I told you. In February."
"Your father," Dana said, "is in Oklahoma."
She let that sit. It sat between them like a third person in the small room.
Then she reached past Junie to the shelf above the washer, where the rag bin was, the old plastic tub full of cut-up T-shirts and worn-out dish towels they used for cleaning. She pulled one out. It was gray and stiff and had once been one of Junie's father's undershirts. She held it out.
"Here," Dana said. "Bathrooms aren't going to clean themselves. You stay home in rags, Juniper. That's what you are tonight. That's where you belong."
Junie didn't take it. Dana dropped it on top of the ruined dress in Junie's arms. Then she picked up her coffee and went out, and a minute later Junie heard her voice in the hallway, bright as a bell: "Kenz! Car in five, baby, we can't be late for Michelle!"
The front door opened. The front door closed. Kenzie's laugh drifted across the yard. The garage door rumbled and Dana's car backed out over the jar of pickles, which broke this time. Junie heard it. A small crunch, very far away.
She sat down on the floor of the laundry room with the dress in her lap.
She did not know how long she sat there. The light from the high window moved across the opposite wall. Her hands stung, and then they stopped stinging and started to itch, and the cuffs of her sweatshirt were bleached in two pale rings. She thought, in a slow, detached way, about the things she had to do. She thought about calling Pearl, and then she thought about Pearl's face, and she couldn't. She thought about texting Priya, I'm not coming, and she got as far as opening the message and typing I'm and then she just looked at the cursor blinking.
She thought about her father on a bucket truck in Broken Arrow, forty feet up in the air with a hospital and a woman with two dogs depending on him, and she thought: I can't. I can't do that to him. He'll come home and it'll be a fight and it'll be my fault, and then he'll leave again in a week and I'll be here with her.