"Mom," Kenzie said. "Mom, what is he talking about? Mom, make him stop."
"I don't know what you think you saw," Dana said, "but that's the household account, Mark, and I run this household, and you agreed—"
"I agreed you could pay the electric bill. I agreed about the braces." He finally turned and looked at her. "Junie, honey. Come here a sec. Smile for me."
Junie didn't move. Then she did. She came across the patio and stood next to her father and looked up at him, and she understood what he wanted, and she smiled, a small one, the best she could do.
"Huh," Mark said, to Dana. "Look at that. No braces."
Dana's mouth opened and closed.
"Forty-seven thousand dollars," he said. "That's what's gone out of that account since we got married. Out of ninety-one. I did the math at a gas station in Caney. Cheer camp. A med spa. A car in Derby that your ex-husband supposedly bought. Two dresses for a dance you told me my daughter didn't want to go to. And then you held her dress down in bleach with a paint bucket." His voice was absolutely level. It was the voice, Junie thought, that he must use forty feet up, when everything was live and one wrong move would kill somebody. "And you told her she could stay home in rags."
"She told you that? Mark, she lies, she has always lied, I have told you a hundred times—"
"Brooke told me," Mark said. "Brooke sent me a picture. Your coffee cup's in it."
Dana turned around. She looked at Brooke, standing small and pale by the slider, and what crossed her face then was so naked and so ugly that Brooke actually took a step back into the doorframe.
"You little—"
"Don't," said Mark. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "Don't you say one word to her. Not one. Not today."
Then he dropped the pink dress into the fire.
It did not burn the way Junie expected. Tulle is mostly nylon, and nylon doesn't really burn so much as shrink away from heat, so the first thing that happened was that the whole enormous cloud of skirt seemed to gasp and collapse into itself, folding inward like a time-lapse of a flower closing. Then it caught. It went up all at once in a long sheet of orange flame that rose six feet in the still air and gave off a smell like burnt sugar and hot plastic, and black smoke rolled up off it, and the heat of it touched Junie's face from ten feet away.