The Dress From the Cedar Chest
“Mine.”
Another pause. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she said. “Put a pot of coffee on and get your good shears out of the drawer, the ones Cory isn’t allowed to use.”
She was at my kitchen table in eighteen minutes, in her quilted barn coat over her nightgown and a pair of Cory’s old jeans she’d left at our house after the garden last summer. She had her sewing basket, her seam ripper, and a box of the long pins with the pearl heads.
She did not ask one question. Not about the furnace, not about Tiffany, not about why at one in the morning. I think Makayla must have texted her, because she knew. She just took her coat off and held out her hand.
“Give me a sleeve,” she said.
Around three, Mom held up one of those big puffed sleeves, all by itself now, like a little ivory balloon.
“You know I cried when you came down the aisle in this,” she said. “I thought, my girl looks like a picture in a magazine. And then afterward Carol Ostrander told me it was out of style by ten years.”
Carol Ostrander was Tiffany’s mother. Cory’s aunt.
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Well, Carol said a lot of things. She had a hard life.” Mom set the sleeve down very gently. “It doesn’t matter. You were the prettiest bride in that church, and I’ll fight anybody about it.”
I had to put down my seam ripper for a minute and look at the ceiling.
By four in the morning, my wedding gown was nine pieces of ivory satin on a bedsheet, a pile of lining, and a cereal bowl full of seed pearls. Mom went home to sleep for three hours. I went to bed for two, then got up and drove to work.
Tuesday I worked a regular shift, six to two. I came home and washed the satin in the bathtub in cool water and a capful of Woolite, the way Mom said, rolled each piece in towels, and hung them over the shower rod and the backs of the kitchen chairs.
Makayla came home from practice and stopped in the kitchen doorway. There was ivory satin on every chair in the room.
“Mom,” she said. “What did you do.”
“Your grandma and I are making you a dress,” I said.
She walked over and touched the edge of one skirt panel. “Is this your wedding dress?”
“It was,” I said. “Now it’s your homecoming dress. If you want it.”
She looked at the satin for a long time. Then she said, “Can it have straps? Not the big sleeves?”
I laughed so hard I had to sit down. “It can have whatever you want, honey. The sleeves are already gone.”
That night Mom came back at seven with her old pattern box. She had kept every pattern she ever bought, sorted by year in shoeboxes. She found a plain fitted sheath with a sweetheart neckline and wide straps from 1988 and said, “This. We’ll flare the skirt a little so she can climb up on a hay rack.”
Then Mom laid the pattern pieces on the satin and stood there with her hands on her hips for about five minutes without moving.
“You only cut satin once,” she said. “So you measure it seven times.”
Wednesday I worked a double, six in the morning to ten at night.