"That's what's left," Junie said.
For a while nobody said anything. Pearl reached out and touched the edge of it with one spotted finger.
"It's enough for a bodice," Pearl said finally. "If you did a bodice in that and a skirt in something else. Something lighter. A gray, maybe, or a silver." She looked at Junie over the top of her glasses. "That'd be a pretty dress. For somebody small."
Junie looked across the table at Brooke. Brooke was looking at the silk the way Junie had looked at it when she was eleven years old and it was still on the top shelf of her mother's sewing closet, with the envelope pinned to it that said For me, eventually.
"The spring formal's in April," Junie said. "That's seven months. If somebody started the bodice now, and did the darts right, and didn't panic on the curves—"
"I always panic on the curves," Brooke said.
"Everybody panics on the curves," said Pearl. "That's what curves are for. Go get a pencil. We'll measure."
Brooke went to get a pencil. Mark, at the stove, flipped a grilled cheese and didn't turn around, which Junie understood was so nobody would see his face. Pearl unrolled her old cloth tape measure, the one with the numbers half rubbed off, that had measured Rose for her prom dress in this same kitchen twenty-three years ago and Junie for hers last winter, and handed one end of it to Junie.
"You do it," Pearl said. "My hands are too shaky. I'll write."
So Junie did it. She stood behind Brooke under the hanging lamp and measured her shoulders, and her waist, and from her collarbone down to the floor, and called each number out, and Pearl wrote it down in the back of a spiral notebook in her big, slanted hand. Outside the window over the sink, the Kansas sky was going from white to apricot to the deep, soft blue that meant someone would soon start making noises about headlights.
Nobody did. Nobody was in any hurry to leave.
When they were done, Junie folded the green silk back into the pillowcase and pinned a note to it, a scrap of paper torn from the corner of Pearl's notebook. She wrote it in pencil, in her own handwriting, which had started, lately, to look a little like her mother's.
For Brooke, it said. Not eventually. Soon.