"My dear," she said, "alterations are included in the price of the dress. They always have been. You paid in full." She put her glasses back on. "The lace is your mother's. The labor is yours. I'll charge you for thread."
It wasn't a gift. I thought about that a lot afterward, whether I'd been rescued. I don't think I was. Nobody gave me anything I hadn't already paid for. Mrs. Kibler had always included alterations; it said so on the card, in small print at the bottom, under the twelve lines. All she did was decide that what was on the table was still the dress I'd bought. All Oksana did was refuse to do it for me.
"Okay," I said. "Six to ten."
"Bring a thimble," Oksana said, and went back into the back room.
I asked my mother that night. I waited until after dinner, which was spaghetti and nobody talked, and Marcus took Hadley out to the barn to help him change the oil in the mower, which didn't need changing, and I stayed at the table while my mother started the dishes.
"I need to ask you something," I said. "About your dress."
Her hands stopped in the dishwater.
I told her. All of it, the way I'd told Oksana, the skirt and the strips and the tea-length and the seams, and the lace. I told her it wasn't to make it come out even. I said that out loud. I said, "I'm not asking so I'll be wearing your dress, like you wanted. I'm still going to wear mine. It's still going to be the one I paid for. I'm asking if I can have the lace. Because it's good lace, and it's the only thing in the world that'll cover twelve seams in eighteen days, and because —" And I didn't know how to finish it. I didn't know what the because was. I still don't, all the way.
My mother stood at the sink with her back to me for so long that I thought she wasn't going to answer.
Then she dried her hands on the dish towel, slowly, each finger, and went upstairs, and I heard the attic ladder come down, and a minute later she came back with the garment bag in her arms and laid it on the kitchen table. She went to the junk drawer by the stove and came out with a seam ripper, a little blue plastic one with a red ball on the end of the hook.