The room at the top of the stairs with the slanted ceiling had been painted a pale blush pink and had a white shag rug that Kenzie left behind, and Junie and her father spent a whole Saturday rolling the walls back to the soft gray-blue they'd been before, the color Rose had picked. When they were done, Mark went up on the stepladder with a star chart he'd printed off the internet and a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars from the dollar store, and spent most of an evening trying to remember exactly where Rose had put Cassiopeia.
"It was over the window," Junie said, lying on her back on the floor. "The W was over the window. And Orion was by the closet."
"I know where Orion was. I'm working up to Orion."
"You're putting the Big Dipper in upside down."
"It's not upside down, it's seasonal, it rotates around the—" He stopped and looked at the chart and then at the ceiling. "Okay, it's upside down."
The laundry room went back to being a laundry room. Mark took the hook off the back of the door himself, and patched the screw holes, and painted over them, and neither of them ever mentioned it.
Brooke came on Saturdays.
It was not complicated, in the end, or not as complicated as Junie had feared. Dana had a job now at a dental office in Wichita that kept her busy on weekends, and Brooke, it turned out, had very firm opinions about where she wanted to spend them. On Saturday mornings Dana dropped her at Pearl's front curb without getting out of the car, and Brooke would come up the walk with her sketchbook and her backpack and say "Hi, Pearl," and Pearl would say, "You're late, the iron's on," even when Brooke was early, which she always was. By July she could press a seam better than Junie. By August Pearl had her cutting pattern pieces, slowly, with her tongue between her teeth, under the hanging lamp.
Most Saturdays Junie and her father came over for lunch. Most Saturdays it was grilled cheese, because Pearl believed grilled cheese was the only acceptable food to eat near fabric, and most Saturdays Mark ate four of them and Pearl told him he'd get fat and he said he already was.
In late September, on one of those Saturdays, Junie went into Pearl's cedar closet for a box of zippers and came out with something else.
It was the rest of the bolt. The green silk. Her mother had bought three yards at the Hutchinson fair thirteen years ago, and Junie had used just over two for the dress and the sash, and the rest of it had been sitting folded on Pearl's top shelf ever since, in a pillowcase, where Junie had left it in January. Two-thirds of a yard. Not enough for a dress. Not even close.
She brought it out and laid it on the kitchen table under the lamp. Everybody stopped what they were doing. Brooke put down her scissors.
"Is that—"