"I'm sorry," my mother said. "That's what it's for. I figured it out. I'm sorry I sat there."
I nodded. I couldn't do more than that.
"It looks better on you than it ever would have on me," she said.
"You don't know that," I said.
She looked at me for a second. Then she laughed. It came out of her all at once, cracked and surprised, a sound I hadn't heard her make in so long that I couldn't remember the last time. "No," she said. "I guess I don't."
That night after everybody was asleep I came downstairs for a glass of water in my graduation dress, because I hadn't taken it off yet and didn't want to, and my mother was on the couch. She was on her end, the left end, with the dent, with her feet tucked under her. The TV was off. She had the old satin dress across her lap, the bare one, the ghost of the vines still pressed into it, and the seam ripper in one hand, and the orange-handled shears were on the end table next to her, and I stopped in the doorway when I saw them.
"I'm not doing anything," she said. "I was just looking at it. I thought maybe I'd make something out of it. A pillow. I don't know. Something you could take to Vermont." She looked at the shears. "I haven't decided."
I stood there in my dress. I thought about driving eleven hours north in three months with everything I owned in the back of Marcus's truck, and Hadley at the shoe counter at Starlite on Friday nights with the card in her nightstand and most of the lines still empty, spraying the blue stuff into somebody's size nine. I didn't know how often I'd come back like I'd promised her, or what this house would feel like when I did. I didn't know whether my mother would keep driving to Harrisonburg on Wednesdays. I didn't know whether what had been cut in all of us was going to hold, pieced back together, or if one day somebody would pull too hard on a seam. I still don't know most of that.
"Sit with me," my mother said.
I didn't, for a second. I stood there in the doorway in the dress I'd paid for twice, with my fingertips still sore. Then I went across the room and sat down on the other end of the couch, carefully, so I wouldn't crush the lace, and my mother moved her feet over to make room, and neither of us said anything. I didn't know yet if that was forgiveness. I'm not sure it has to be, yet. It was a place on the couch, next to her, where I could see everything she was doing with her hands, and that night it was enough to start with.