But I'm not there yet. I have to tell you about my mother's dress first. I didn't want to, for a long time. I'd rather tell you about the lanes.
My mother is Tricia Overholt. She was born Tricia Shifflett, here in Bramwell, and except for one year in an apartment in Harrisonburg when I was a baby, she has lived her whole life within six miles of the house she grew up in. She has worked the front desk of a dental practice in Staunton for eleven years, and she is very good at it, and she says she likes it. She is thirty-five years old. She was seventeen when she had me. You can do that math. Everybody in Bramwell always has.
In March, a week after my Vermont acceptance came, and three days after the fight about Vermont, she brought a garment bag down from the attic.
The short version of the fight about Vermont is that I got in, and I got a financial aid package that made it almost possible, and my mother wanted me to go to the community college in Weyers Cave for two years and then transfer to James Madison, forty minutes away, and live at home and save money. She wasn't wrong about the money. I said she was wrong about everything else, loudly, and Marcus went out to the barn and ran the table saw for an hour without building anything.
Three days later I came home from a Thursday shift and my mother was sitting on my bed with a long white garment bag across her knees. It was an old bag, the zipper kind with a clear plastic window at the top, and it was gray with dust along the folds where it had been lying across boxes in the attic, and there was a cardboard tag tied to the hanger with a piece of red yarn that said, in my grandmother's handwriting, T's dress.
"I want to show you something," my mother said.
She unzipped it. Inside was a white dress. Or it had been white. It was strapless, with a sweetheart neckline and a fitted satin bodice and a full satin skirt, and over the whole thing, bodice and skirt both, was a layer of lace, cream-colored lace with a pattern of little vines and flowers and leaves running all through it. It had been put away a long time ago. Along every fold there was a line the color of weak tea, and the satin underneath had gone a sort of old-ivory that no bleach was ever going to bring back.
"It's from 2008," my mother said. "It's never been worn. I bought it at Kibler's. Mrs. Kibler sold it to me. I thought — Oksana could take it in. Put straps on it. Two inches, for the code. She could do it in a week. I asked her. I took a picture and showed her. She said it was good lace, she said lace like this you can't get anymore. I'd pay for it. I already have the money. I've been putting my tips from the Christmas bonus —"
"Mom," I said.
"It would fit you. With some work. We're the same —"
"Mom, it's yellow."