The Wedding Dress My Neighbor Remade

“I can make it hers,” Darlene said. “I can’t do it without cutting, and I don’t mean a hem. The sleeves come off. The collar comes off. The lining has to come out, and length has to go in, and width. I can’t make it so you can put it back the way it was.” She put her hand flat on the plastic. “So I’m asking. May I?”

I looked at the lace for a good while.

“And if I say no?”

“Then I zip the bag, and I hang it on your mother’s hanger myself, and I never mention it. I’d be sorry. But I’d do it.”

“I’d like the night,” I said.

“That’s fair,” Darlene said, and she went home and left the bag zipped on my table.

I did not sleep much. About two in the morning I opened the bag the rest of the way and sat with it in the kitchen with only the stove light on. I had thought I would remember the day, and what I mostly remembered was my mother with a needle in her mouth, taking in the waist the night before the wedding because I had been too nervous to eat.

At seven I crossed the yard in my housecoat and knocked on Darlene’s back door.

“Cut it,” I said.

“You’re sure.”

“I should have offered it in March. I didn’t. Cut it.”

She nodded once, and then she laid down terms, the way she does about everything. She wanted to work with the curtains shut and Hailey told nothing, so that the girl would see the dress whole and not in pieces. She wanted to do it at her own table on her own schedule. And she wanted me to stay on my side of the fence.

“I can’t promise the third thing,” I said.

“My door’s open to you,” Darlene said. “It always is. If you walk in and say stop, I stop. That is the whole rule. I’d just as soon you didn’t, because the next two weeks it’ll be pieces and you’ll hate every one.”

“Then put a card on the storm door,” I said. “I’ll need something to read.”

She taped it up that afternoon, an index card in her block letters. It said, Not yet.

That was how it came to be on her door, and I want it clear that it was my idea.

The first week I heard more of that kitchen than I saw of it. The curtains were drawn across the window in the middle of a bright morning. Behind them ran a sewing machine, not her good Bernina but the other one, the industrial straight-stitch she bought off the dry cleaner’s when it closed, which sounds like a small plane taking off from a very short runway. It ran for a stretch, stopped, ran again.