"Not your hands," she said. "Mine."
"Mom —"
"You can sew it on. You and Oksana. But I'll take it off. That part's mine." She sat down at the table and unzipped the bag and lifted the dress out and laid it across her lap, and turned the hem of the skirt up so the inside showed, where the lace had been stitched down to the satin with tiny invisible stitches all along the edge. "Mrs. Kibler's mother sewed this," she said. "Did you know that? Old Mrs. Kibler. She did all the work then. She's been dead fifteen years." She slid the point of the seam ripper under the first stitch. "Sit down, Marlo."
I sat down across from her.
I'd come home from Kibler's at ten-thirty every night that week, and every night she was at the table waiting with the seam ripper. She cut the first stitch. It made the smallest sound, a tiny tick, like a fingernail on a tooth. Then the next one. Then the next. She went slowly, carefully, a stitch at a time, lifting the lace away from the satin an inch at a time, and I sat across the table and watched her do it.
It took me a while to understand what she was really doing. She was sitting at the table taking apart her dress, the dress she'd carried for eighteen years, stitch by stitch, while her daughter sat across from her and watched. She didn't say anything about it. She didn't look up at me. But the third or fourth night, when she was almost done with the skirt, with a long pale spill of lace piled on the table beside her like a cloud, she said, without stopping, "You can go, you know. You don't have to sit here."
"I know," I said.
"It's a long time to sit and watch somebody."
"I know," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."
She took the last of the lace off the bodice on Thursday night, a little before midnight. When it was done she held it up in front of the light over the stove, and you could see every vine and leaf through it, and it wasn't yellow at all, not the lace. The lace had only been lying on the yellow all those years. The yellow was the satin underneath.