"She stood where you are standing. She told Mrs. Kibler what she did. That she sat on the couch. That she watched." Oksana set another pin. "She said she wanted us to know it wasn't only the little one. She said it was not fair the little one should stand here and say it alone." She looked up at me. "Mrs. Kibler made her a cup of tea. They sat in the back for an hour. I did not listen." She went back to the pins. "Much."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything. I picked up the strap she'd finished and turned it over in my hands.
My mother had brought the lace to Kibler's in the pillowcase on Friday morning before work, and Oksana soaked it overnight in a tub of cool water with something white from a jug in the back that she wouldn't tell me the name of, and when it came out and dried on a towel across the cutting table it was the color of fresh cream, not white exactly, but close enough to white that next to my crepe you'd have had to know to see it. Then the real work started. We laid the skirt flat and laid the lace over it and pinned it, hundreds of pins, every few inches along every vine, so the pattern ran down over the twelve seams and hid them. Then I sewed it down by hand, one tiny stitch at a time, through the lace and into the crepe, following the edges of the leaves so the thread disappeared. Hadley did the hem. Mrs. Kibler came back sometimes after she'd counted out the register and sat on a stool and watched us, and once she corrected the way I was holding my needle by reaching over and moving my fingers, without a word, like she was setting a clock.
The straps were mine. Oksana showed me once and then wouldn't touch them. I rebuilt both of them out of what was left, crepe on the inside and a strip of lace on the outside, two inches wide exactly. I stuck myself with the needle so many times my left fingertips were dotted like a pincushion, and one night I bled on the inside of the left strap, a tiny brown spot where nobody would ever see it, and Oksana looked at it and shrugged and said, "Now it's yours."
On the first Friday Hadley paid me thirty-eight dollars. She'd had the Funkhouser kids on Tuesday and the Lineweaver twins the Saturday before. She gave it to me in an envelope at the kitchen table, and I counted it out loud in front of her, every bill, the way Mrs. Kibler did, and wrote it on the first line of the card, and initialed it, and handed her the pen, and she initialed it too. She looked at the four hundred and thirty-four dollars and eighty cents still left at the bottom of the card and didn't say anything. Marcus was at the stove making eggs with his back to us. He didn't turn around, but I saw his shoulders let go of something.
He slept on the couch nine nights. I don't know everything that happened between him and my mother during that time and it isn't my business. I know that on the tenth night I heard the couch springs not creak, and in the morning his pillow was gone from the end of it. I know my mother called someone in Harrisonburg whose name was on a card on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a tooth, and that she drove over there on two Wednesday afternoons before graduation and didn't say where she was going and didn't need to. I know that Marcus and I still didn't talk about any of it in the truck, and that one Saturday night driving home from Starlite he said, out of nowhere, "You did right. With the card," and I said, "I know," and he said, "Well," and that was all.
We finished on the Wednesday before the Walk, a little after eleven. Oksana made me put it on in the back room in front of the mirror with the crack in the corner. Then she made me come out front and stand on the carpeted box in front of the three-way mirror, the same box I'd stood on in November, and Hadley stood next to Mrs. Kibler with her hands over her mouth like Destiny had six months before, and Mrs. Kibler said nothing at all.
It wasn't the same dress. I want to be honest about that. It was never going to be the same dress. The bodice was mine, the square neckline, the V in the back with thirty-one white buttons running down it, all of them, the same as the day I'd first tried it on. But below the waist it ended just past the middle of my calf instead of the floor, and the lace ran over the whole skirt, vines and leaves and tiny flowers, the color of cream against the white, and up over each strap and onto my shoulders. When I turned, it didn't move like water anymore. It moved like something heavier and more careful, like a curtain in a house where somebody's living. If you looked closely, really closely, you could see the seams under the lace, twelve thin lines running down from the waist. I could see them. I'll always be able to see them.
"Well," Oksana said, behind me in the mirror. "Not soup."
The last Friday in May, at seven o'clock in the evening, I walked down the middle of Hupp Field.