"Marcus said I should ask you about 2008," I said.
She closed her eyes. She kept them closed for a while. Then she opened them, and looked at the lace instead of at me, and started to talk, and she talked for a long time, and I didn't interrupt her once.
She bought it in February of her senior year, at Kibler's. Mrs. Kibler sold it to her, and she put it on layaway, the same way I had, and paid for it working the register at the Food Lion in Staunton after school. She'd wanted it since she was a little girl watching the Walk from the fence, the same exact spot I had. In March she found out she was pregnant with me.
"I didn't tell anybody until April," she said. "I couldn't. I was so scared. Your grandmother was — you didn't really know her. She was a hard woman. She went to church three times a week and she believed every word of it, and she believed what people said about her was the same as what God thought about her, and she couldn't tell the difference. When I told her she didn't speak to me for nine days. Not a word. She'd put my plate down on the table in front of me and walk away."
By May she was five months along and showing. The dress still fit, more or less; the skirt was full, and Mrs. Kibler let out the bodice for her an inch without asking any questions. The night before graduation, she put it on in her bedroom, and her mother came in, and looked at her.
"She said I was not going to stand up on that field in front of this whole town in white with that belly," my mother said. Her voice was very flat. "She said white was for girls who'd earned it. She said she would not sit in those stands and have every woman in her church look at her daughter walking down the middle of Hupp Field in white like a bride, carrying you. She said if I walked she wouldn't come, and she wouldn't let me back in the house after. And I believed her. She meant it. She always meant it."
"So you didn't go," I said. It was the first thing I'd said.
"I didn't go. I sat in my room with the window open. You can hear the band from our old house, if the wind's right. I heard the whole march. I heard them read the names. They read mine. I heard it, from three miles off. Tricia Ann Shifflett. And then nobody came up, and they went on to the next one." She touched the lace. "In July I went to the front office and picked up my diploma in a manila envelope with my yearbook, and the secretary didn't look at me. That was my graduation."
I sat there. I looked at the dress, the tea-colored lines along every fold, the place where somebody, my mother, eighteen years ago, had let out the bodice an inch.
"I cried that night," my mother said. "The night of. I cried in my room in that dress, and my mother came in and stood in the door and looked at me, and you know what she said to me?"
I knew. I knew before she said it. I felt it come up the back of my neck like cold water.