She would remember the center of the floor, where they stopped and turned to face the bleachers, and how for one second she couldn't see anything at all, just lights.
And she would remember the clapping. Because at first it was the ordinary clapping, the polite, warm clapping that every couple got, and then, from the side door by the trophy case, it got louder. One man. Clapping like he was trying to break his own hands. And then, in the front row, a small old woman got slowly to her feet, and then a freckled girl in a hand-me-down sweatshirt stood up next to her, and then Mrs. Delgado in the third row, who had seen the green dress two weeks ago and knew exactly what had happened to it, because Priya's mother had told Mrs. Okafor who had told the whole Methodist church by six-fifteen, stood up too. And then other people. Not everybody. But enough.
One minute. That was all she had wanted.
She got a little more than that.
Afterward, when the March was done and the music had started and the floor had filled up with kids doing the same four dance moves under the paper lanterns, she found her father by the trophy case. He'd been crying. He wasn't anymore. He was just standing there, looking tired and sunburned and enormous in a shirt that was too small for him.
"I owe you a picture," Junie said. She held up her phone. "You said you wanted one of just me."
"I changed my mind," said Mark Hale, and put his arm around her, and she held the phone up, and they both looked into it, and she took it. Then she took another one, because he'd blinked. Then he took the phone from her and stepped back and said, "Okay. Now one of just you," and she stood against the cinder-block wall under the trophy case in her mother's dress and her mother's silk and her grandmother's stitches and her own, and she smiled for him, the real one this time, the one with no braces.
* * *
Things did not get fixed all at once. Things almost never do.
Dana's lawyer called Mark's lawyer, Ted Ruskin's cousin Annette, on the first Wednesday in May, and the word fraud was used in a conference room in Hutchinson by Annette and not by anybody else, and after that the conversation went faster than anyone expected. The settlement, when it came in August, returned twenty-nine thousand dollars to the account called ROSE FOR JUNIE, which was not all of it, and which Mark said was enough, and which Pearl said was nowhere near enough but would do. The white Acura went back to the dealership in Derby. Dana moved into a townhouse in west Wichita with Kenzie, who started at Butler Community College in the fall and who sent Junie exactly one text, at eleven-forty on a Tuesday night in September, that said: I'm sorry about the laundry room. I should have said something. I'm not asking you to say it's ok. Junie read it four times. Then she wrote back: Thank you for saying it. Neither of them wrote anything after that, and somehow that felt right, too.
Kenzie's video of the fire was never posted. Junie never asked why.
Mark gave notice to Hollis the Monday after the dance. Hollis said he'd been waiting for it for three years and asked if he could come to the next birthday party. In June, Mark took a job with the Corbin municipal electric utility, which paid a little more than half of what the storm crew paid and meant he slept in his own bed every night of the week. He sold the F-250 and bought a used Silverado with a working radio. He learned to make two dinners. He made both of them a lot.
In June, too, Junie moved back upstairs.