"Thank you for telling me," she said finally. "That took some doing." She turned to me. "Let's see it, my dear. Oksana! Come out front, please. Bring your glasses."
Oksana Hrycak had been Mrs. Kibler's seamstress for twenty-two years. She was from Lviv originally and had come to Virginia in the nineties, and she was small and gray-haired and severe, and she wore a pincushion on her left wrist like a watch, and she had pinned up my hem in April without saying more than ten words to me, all of them numbers. She came out and I opened the garbage bag on the big cutting table by the window and we laid the dress out on it the way I'd laid it on my bed.
Oksana didn't touch it at first. She put her glasses on and bent over it and walked slowly all the way around the table, the way I'd walked around my bed with my phone. She lifted one strip with the tip of a pin and let it fall. She ran her thumb down the row of buttons.
"Who taught her to cut like this?" she said.
Nobody answered.
"Clean," Oksana said, mostly to herself. "Good scissors. Straight lines. No hacking. Somebody was angry but not crazy." She straightened up. "The top is fine. The top is perfect. The straps I can rebuild. The skirt is finished. The skirt is" — she said a word in Ukrainian that I don't know but understood perfectly — "the skirt is soup."
"Can you make a new skirt?" I said.
"From what? This crepe, I don't have. I order it, six weeks, eight weeks. When is the Walk?"
"The twenty-ninth."
"Eighteen days." Oksana shook her head. "No."