She folded it into a pillowcase and handed it to me across the table. Then she looked at the satin dress lying in her lap, bare now, the old ivory gone the color of weak tea, with the ghost of the vine pattern still pressed into it where the lace had been, like the mark a ring leaves on a finger.
"I'm going to keep this," she said. "I don't know why. I'm just going to keep it."
"Okay," I said.
I went to Kibler's every night for sixteen nights. I gave up my Tuesday and Thursday shifts at Starlite, and Mr. Galvan, in his Thursday shirt, purple with green flames, heard the whole story at the shoe counter and said, "Weekends you're mine, weeknights you're hers," and put Hadley's name on the summer schedule in pencil without my even asking.
The first nights were the worst, because they were machine nights and I could only watch. Oksana cut the skirt off the bodice two inches above where the longest slit stopped, and then laid the strips out on the cutting table in the order they'd come off, and trimmed each ragged edge straight with a rotary cutter and a ruler, and sewed them back together side by side on her big black Juki machine, one long seam after another, the needle going so fast it hummed. When she was done she held up what she'd made against the light. It was a skirt, more or less. It had twelve seams running down it like the lines on notebook paper, and you could see every one.
"There," Oksana said. "Ugly. Now we fix ugly."
Hadley came the second night. Marcus drove her and sat out front in the truck with his paperback, the dome light on, the way he used to wait for me outside Starlite, and Hadley came in through the brass bell and stood by the cutting table not knowing what to do with her hands. Oksana looked at her over her glasses and put a needle and a spool of white thread and a thimble down on the table in front of her.
Hadley learned to thread a needle, and then the invisible stitch Oksana used for hems, on scraps first. Oksana made her tear out her first forty stitches and do them again. Hadley sat at the end of the cutting table with her tongue between her teeth like she used to when she colored, and did them again.
On the third night, while Hadley was in the bathroom, Oksana said, without looking up from the pins she was setting along a strap, "Your mother came on Tuesday."
I stopped. "Marcus said she might."