"It's in a box in my cedar closet," Pearl said. "I wrapped it in muslin twenty-three years ago. I haven't opened it since she died."
"Could you—"
"Bring her to me," said Pearl Ostrander. "Bring her to me by five-thirty. I'll have the machine oiled."
* * *
His truck came up Larkspur Court at four-forty-one, and Junie heard it before she saw it, because there was no other engine in Corbin that sounded like her father's F-250, a sort of grumbling cough, like an old man clearing his throat before he tells you something important.
She was still in the laundry room. She had gotten up off the floor at some point, and she had changed her socks, and Brooke had made her a peanut butter sandwich that she had eaten half of. The ruined dress was lying across the dryer where she had spread it out, as if there might be some way to save it if she just looked at it long enough. There wasn't. She knew that. Pearl had taught her about fibers when she was eight. Protein fibers, silk and wool, do not survive chlorine. They go weak and then they go to nothing.
She heard the truck door. She heard the garage door. She heard her father's boots in the mudroom, heavy, fast, and then they stopped.
He was standing in the doorway in his work clothes, the orange high-visibility vest still on over a T-shirt that was gray with dried sweat, his face sunburned in the shape of his safety glasses. He looked at her. He looked at the bed against the wall with Pearl's quilt on it, and the high window that looked at the Porters' fence, and the pile of her folded clothes on top of the dryer because there was no dresser, and the hook on the back of the door, and the dress.
He looked at all of it as if he had never been in this room before. In a way, Junie realized, he hadn't.
"Dad," she said. "Daddy, I'm sorry. I didn't want you to have to—you were working, and the hospital, and I didn't want you to—"
"Stop."
She stopped.
He came in. He did not hug her, not yet. He picked up the dress from the dryer, carefully, with both hands, the way you would pick up something injured. A long piece of the skirt tore away under its own weight and hung from his fingers. He looked at it.
"Your mom held this up to her face," he said. "In a tent at the Hutchinson fair. She said it was the color of the river at the state park." He laid it back down on the dryer. "Did you know that? Did I ever tell you that?"