* * *
Pearl Ostrander's kitchen had been converted into an operating room.
The table was cleared and covered with a clean white sheet. The lamp had been pulled down low on its chain. The old Bernina, which Pearl had bought used in 1987 and maintained ever since with the devotion other people reserved for classic cars, sat at one end with a spool of navy thread already on the pin, and the ironing board stood open by the stove with the iron heating. On the back of a kitchen chair, under a sheet of muslin that Pearl had not yet lifted, lay something long and dark.
Pearl met them at the door. She looked at Junie, and then at Mark, and then at Brooke, whom she had met exactly twice, at a wedding and a funeral that wasn't Rose's, and she seemed to take it all in at once.
"You," she said to Mark, "go wash. You smell like a transformer. There's a shirt of Walt's in the hall closet that'll fit you if you don't breathe much." To Brooke: "Can you work an iron?"
"I—yeah. Sort of."
"Sort of is fine. I'll teach you the rest." And to Junie, very softly, holding out both arms: "Come here, baby."
Junie went. Pearl was small, smaller than Junie now, and she smelled like cedar and lavender and the cocoa she'd been drinking, and she held on to Junie for a long time, rocking very slightly from side to side, the way you'd rock a baby who was finally falling asleep.
"I'm sorry about your dress," Pearl said into her hair. "Four months. Those darts."
"I know."
"We'll make another one. This summer. Out of something nobody can touch." She stepped back and wiped her eyes briskly with the heel of her hand. "Now. We have one hour and forty minutes, and I'm too old to waste any of it crying. Let's see what we've got."
She lifted the muslin.
Junie had seen pictures of the dress all her life. There was one on Pearl's mantel, in a silver frame: her mother at seventeen, all elbows and enormous smile, standing on this same front porch in 2003 next to a boy whose name nobody could now remember, wearing the dress Pearl had made her. Midnight blue satin, a simple scooped neck, wide straps, a long straight skirt with a slit at one side that, according to family legend, Pearl had refused to cut and Rose had cut herself with kitchen shears at eleven o'clock the night before.
In the photograph it looked dark, almost black. In real life, under Pearl's lamp, it was the deep blue of the sky about twenty minutes after the sun goes down, when the first star comes out and the fields go silver. It had been wrapped so carefully for so long that it barely had a crease.