"You're doing my car, right?" she said, without looking up.
"It's on the list."
"Do the floor mats. Like, actually take them out. Last time you just vacuumed around them." She licked her spoon. "Mom says you're still going tonight?"
"I'm still going."
"In your little homemade thing." Kenzie smiled at her phone. "That's so cute. Seriously. It's like a Hallmark movie. The poor orphan girl sews her own gown." She looked up, finally, and her eyes were flat and pretty and completely uninterested. "You know people are going to think it's from Goodwill, right? Like, I'm not being mean. I'm helping. Madison's sister made her own dress for homecoming two years ago and people still call her Laura Ingalls."
"I'm not an orphan," Junie said. "I have a dad."
"Sure," said Kenzie, and dropped the spoon in the sink, and went back upstairs.
At eleven Junie took the car keys off the hook. Dana let her drive the old Corolla for errands, and only for errands, and checked the mileage afterward. She stood in the mudroom with the keys in her hand, and for some reason she couldn't have named, she went back into the laundry room first and looked at the dress.
It was fine. Of course it was fine. It was hanging on the door in its bag, emerald under plastic.
She touched the zipper of the garment bag. She thought about taking it with her, laying it across the back seat. That was ridiculous. She'd be gone an hour, maybe an hour and a half. She was not going to drive around Corbin with her dress in the car like a crazy person.
She went.
Walgreens didn't have the good hairspray, so she drove to the CVS out by the highway, which did. Dillons was crowded, Saturday crowded, carts everywhere and a woman giving out samples of sausage on toothpicks. The dry cleaner had lost the ticket and had to look up Dana's account, which took fifteen minutes and a phone call to the owner's son. By the time she pulled back into the driveway on Larkspur Court it was twelve-forty and she was already doing the math again, faster.
She knew before she opened the door.
It was the smell. It came out to meet her in the garage, sharp and clean and wrong, so strong that it caught in the back of her throat and made her eyes sting. Bleach. Everyone knows that smell. It is the smell of hospitals and public pools and the backs of restaurants, and it was coming from the mudroom, and the mudroom shared a wall with the laundry room, and the laundry room—