Chapter 2
JENNA
She came at eleven on Saturday, two hours earlier than she'd said, in the good coat she wears when she's decided something is an occasion.
I was on the living room floor in leggings with my hair clipped up, hemming the bodysuit that goes under the harness, four pins in my mouth when the bell rang.
"I'll get it!" Lucy shouted from upstairs, and came down two at a time.
Diane brought the cold in on her coat, and a white garment bag over her arm.
Not a shopping bag. A garment bag — the long kind with the zipper down the front and the hanger hook curved out the top, the kind that comes from a place that expects you to keep the bag.
"Where's my girl."
"Grandma!"
Lucy hit her at the hip. Diane laughed and got one arm around her, holding that bag up out of the way with the other, which told me she'd been carrying it carefully for a while.
I took the pins out of my mouth and stuck them in the arm of the chair, where they live during a project, whatever Eric has to say about it. Then I got up off the floor. My knee cracked on the way, because I'm fifty-one and I'd been down there forty minutes.
"Hi, Diane."
"Jenna, honey, you look busy."
"Little bit."
"I can come back."
"You're here. Come sit."
She didn't sit. She stood in the middle of the room with the bag held out from her body and her face doing that specific shining thing it does right before she gives somebody something.
Diane is seventy-six with excellent posture, and she has been handing people presents for as long as I've known her, and she is uncomplicatedly happy in the minute before a thing gets opened.
"Now," she said. "Lucy. I was at the mall on Wednesday."
"Ma," Eric said from the kitchen doorway, smiling.
"I was at the mall on Wednesday, I went past that window, and I stopped dead in the middle of the walkway. A woman ran into me with a stroller."
"You didn't tell me that part."
"I'm telling it now." She laid the bag across the back of the couch and got the zipper between two fingers. "I saw this and I thought, that's Lucy. That is Lucy exactly."
She pulled it down.
It was beautiful. A gown, deep blue going paler at the shoulders, the bodice worked over in crystals that started dense at the waist and scattered as they climbed.
Some kind of net in the underskirt held the hem out instead of letting it hang flat.
There was an actual cape, sheer, with more crystals caught in it, like the whole thing had been dragged through frost. At the bottom of the bag, in its own clear box, a crown.
Silver, six inches tall, with real weight to it.
Lucy made a sound I'd never heard her make.
For a second she didn't say anything at all. She put out one hand and touched the crystals at the waist with two fingertips, the way you touch a thing in a museum when there's no rope.
"Grandma."
"Do you like it?"
"Grandma."
"She likes it," Eric said.
Diane laughed with her hand pressed flat to her chest. "The woman in the store says it's made for a girl your size, so it should fit right out of the bag. Maybe the hem. Your mother can look at the hem."
"Can I try it on?"
"Well, of course you can try it on."
Lucy carried it upstairs with both arms out in front of her like she was carrying water.
We heard the door shut, then open again immediately so she could shout down that the crown box wouldn't fit through with the dress.
Eric took it up. The door shut again. After that the floor over the living room creaked twice and went quiet, which is what happens when she's got something over her head and can't see.
Diane finally sat, in the chair she always sits in, and let out a big satisfied breath.
"I couldn't help it," she said. "I saw it in the window."
"It's a stunning dress, Diane."
"It's stunning," I said again, because it was, and because a small silence had opened that wanted filling.
"That woman helped me forty minutes. Brought out three." She smoothed the cape where it lay over the couch back. "There was a red. Very dramatic. But blue's her color with that hair."
"It is."
"She'll want her hair up with it. You can do that French thing you did for the wedding."
"That took two hours and she cried."
"She was seven."
"She was nine, and she still brings it up."
"It's not cheap, I'll tell you that much. But she's eleven. She's not going to want to dress up like this much longer. Two more years they're all in makeup wanting to be a dead cheerleader."
"That's true."
"Ask me how much."
"I'm not going to ask you how much."
"Go on."
"Diane."
"Three hundred and change," she said, "and I'd do it again."
Then she looked around the room the way she does, taking inventory. Diane can walk into a house and know inside of forty seconds what's been moved.
"You've got the ironing board out."
"I'm hemming the underlayer for the moth."
"The moth."
"Lucy's costume. The one we've been making."
"Oh, the green thing on the table." She nodded, pleasant about it. "I saw that Tuesday when I dropped off the pie plate. Very clever, what you do with the wire."
"Thank you."
"My mother sewed. Not like that — aprons, hems, that kind of thing. She'd have said that was a lot of work for one night."
"It's not really for one night."
"No?"
"It's the making. That's most of it."
"Mm," Diane said, in the tone people use when they've decided to agree with you instead of continuing.
She asked about work and I told her the billing office was two people short and the new system had eaten a week of my life. She told me about her neighbor's hip. It was a perfectly pleasant conversation between two women who've known each other twenty-two years and have never once had a fight.
Upstairs a door. Then feet in the hall. Then a pause at the top of the stairs that I recognized as staging, because that child has always understood an entrance.
She came down.
The dress fit her like it had been waiting for her, throwing light around the room every time she moved, the crown sitting in her hair like she'd been born in it.
She took the last three stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, holding the skirt out with the other, laughing at herself and also not laughing at all.
"Oh," Diane said, and her eyes went wet on the spot.
"Look at you," Eric said.
I said it too. "Lucy. Honey. You look incredible." And I meant every word, because she did, and because I have never once been able to look at my kid glowing like that and feel nothing but grievance.
She turned around twice and the cape lifted. Diane came forward to the edge of her chair.
"It has pockets," Lucy said, in total disbelief.
"It does not."
"Mom. It has pockets."
She spun again. The skirt went out, she nearly took the lamp off the side table, and Diane's hand came up for it without her even looking. Everybody laughed.
Then Lucy said, "Wait — how am I going to wear the wings with this?"
She had one hand up at her shoulder, feeling for where the harness straps would sit. In her head both things were still true at the same time.
Nobody answered right away.
Diane looked at Eric. Eric looked at the carpet for about a second and a half, and I watched him get there.
"You'll wear Grandma's to the party," he said. "You can wear Mom's another time."
I didn't move.
Lucy's hand was still up at her shoulder. She brought it down and smoothed the front of the skirt with both palms, the way you do when somebody's just taken your picture.
Nothing happened. Nobody raised a voice.
Diane said something warm about the school parade, Lucy said okay in the easy way kids say okay once the adults have settled a thing, then asked if she could stay in the dress a while, and Eric said sure.
Diane wanted to know if there was coffee.
I said yes and went to make it. My hands did the filter and the water and the switch with no input from me whatsoever.
The kitchen table was still covered.
Both wings were up there now, propped against the cereal boxes side by side, the way they'd been drying since Thursday.
Green and silver, six feet across at the widest. The little sealed bag with the LED pack sat next to the glue gun where I'd left it Wednesday night, still unopened, because I'd wanted to save it.
I stood there and looked at them while the coffee maker started to hiss.
Another time.
Three mugs down. Sugar out, because Diane takes sugar. The little pitcher for the milk, because she doesn't like a carton on the table. My hands did all of it without me while I stood at the counter breathing through my nose until the hissing stopped.
In the other room she was telling Eric about a woman at church whose grandson got into Penn State. Lucy's feet went up the stairs, crossed the ceiling, and stopped over the kitchen where her room is, and I knew she was standing at her mirror.
The milk had gone about two days past where I'd have wanted it, so I smelled it at the sink first, twice, then tipped it into the pitcher anyway.
I poured three cups and carried them in on the tray my sister gave us, set them on the coffee table, sat on the arm of the couch, and asked Diane whether the grandson had gotten in-state tuition.
No, she said. That was the whole problem.
For the next forty minutes I was completely normal. Warm. Funny once. I refilled her cup. At the door I hugged her and told her that dress was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in a store in years, which was true.
Then I came back to the kitchen and stood in front of those wings again.
Lucy was still in the dress upstairs. I could hear her moving around above me, slow, the way you move when you're watching yourself do it.
I picked up the little sealed bag. Four LEDs, a coin cell, forty inches of hair-thin wire. Nine dollars, and it had taken me two weeks to work out where to hide it.
I set it back down beside the glue gun and went to get the vacuum, because there was organza thread all over the front room carpet.