THERE CAME A LOUD knock on the door.
I startled awake, my novel draped across my stomach.
“Jane?” my mother was calling out. “Can you get that? I’m at the machine.”
“Sure, Mom.” I set the novel on the wobbly metal coffee table, facedown to keep my place, and got up. Mrs. McIntyre watched me from the other side of the screen, a big brown leather purse clutched to her side like someone might run up and steal it. Then again, in our neighborhood, someone might.
“Hi, Jane, dear,” she said in a strong Irish brogue. “I’ve got an appointment with your mum. Sara’s wedding’s coming up in no time.”
“Hi, Mrs. M.,” I said, letting her in. “When’s the date?”
“The last weekend in July,” she sighed. “The twenty-ninth. We’re tearing our hair out with the arrangements.”
“I’m sure. Hang on a sec, and I’ll tell my mother you’re here.”
“Thanks, dear.” She took a seat on our beat-up couch, purse still clutched tight.
I poked my head into the sewing room. Hot-pink satin was speeding through my mother’s old Singer—she swore the antique machines worked better than the electric ones—her bun sticking into the air as she bent over her work. “Mom?”
Everything came to a stop.
My mother took the pins from her mouth. “Tell her I’ll be just five more minutes, would you, please?”
“Sure.”
The corners of her brown eyes crinkled. “Come give your old ma a hug.”
“You’re not old,” I protested, and went to her.
She found me from beneath the yards of satin and drew me into a sea of pink. “I love you, you know.”
“I do know,” I said, wanting to stay in her arms and leave at the same time. Eventually I pulled back. “Finish up so you don’t keep Mrs. M. waiting. She seems stressed.”
My mother rolled her eyes. “She’s always stressed. It’s not just the wedding. The stress runs in her veins.”
I laughed. Gave my mother a quick peck on the forehead just before she got that pedal going again, the needle moving up and down so quick it was a blur.
• • •
“Stop your fidgeting,” my mother was saying a while later.
“What?” I’d been daydreaming about Handel. Lost in my head. It was so good to be lost in wishful thinking, in romantic possibility. It pushed away the bad, the dark, the fear that’s had me lost ever since winter, alone in a tiny, rickety boat in the middle of the sea.
My mother shifted the heavy, ruffled train of Sara McIntyre’s wedding dress, and I could feel its strong tug on my lower back.
Sometimes my job in the dressmaking business is to be the mannequin of the house. Today it definitely was. Mrs. McIntyre needed to get an idea of how her daughter’s wedding dress was coming along, and I was to help her with the vision. Mrs. McIntyre seemed happy, with all that oohing and aahing, but I thought the dress was hideous. Spangles and sequins and pearls everywhere and enough ruffles for a princess. I kept silent, of course, since this meant my mother was going to make a mint with the kind of work it took to sew all that beading. I knew my mother wouldn’t be offended, either, if I gave her my opinion later. I just make what the customer wants, not what I think is pretty, she’d say.
My mother shifted the train a little more to the left. “If you keep moving, Jane, I’m never going to get this right and we’ll be here all afternoon.”
“Sorry,” I said, and tried to stand still.
“Well now,” Mrs. McIntyre said. There was a hidden smile in her voice. “We wouldn’t want that! Jane’s doing me a favor, standing in for my Sara while she’s away.” She glanced up at me, then again at my mother. She smirked. “Did your daughter tell you? She’s been taking walks through town with Handel Davies.”
My skin burned at this, bright against the bleeding white of the dress.
“Is that right, Jane?” my mother said absently, but I could tell she was interested.
“We were just talking. And it was just one walk.” God, I hated this neighborhood sometimes. People talked too much, and unfortunately a lot of this talk went on while my mother was pinning up fabric and pinning on fabric and the ladies she was pinning it up and onto were yapping about every damn thing that happened around here, gossip-worthy or not.
Mrs. McIntyre looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t seeing her daughter’s wedding dress now. “That Davies boy runs with a rough crowd.”
Whether she was informing my mother or me of this was unclear. Like I didn’t know this already. Like everyone didn’t know this already.
“All right,” my mother said, unperturbed. There was the short rip of a zipper. “This gown is all set for today.”
I wanted to kiss her. “Can I go, then?”
“Yes, but you need to change first,” she said.
“Obviously.” I lifted up the giant skirt and gathered the train over one arm. Did my best to fit through the narrow doorway and cross the hall to my room without tripping and killing myself. I stepped out of the dress, trying not to shift any of the pins. Hushed conversation floated through the house from the sewing room as I slipped a tank top over my head and shimmied on a pair of jean shorts. Heaping the gown into my arms, I tiptoed back to my mother and Mrs. McIntyre, trying to catch them mid-gossip.
“—there hasn’t been another one since,” Mrs. McIntyre was saying.
I halted just outside the sewing room. Listened. Watched them through the crack in the open door.
My mother shifted in her sewing chair. “I just never thought—I couldn’t have imagined my daughter caught in the middle of something like that. And her father . . .”
“How are you feeling, dear? What a loss. And poor Jane.”
“Oh, you know. It’s hard,” my mother said. “I wish they’d catch whoever did it.”
My breath caught, a tiny, sharp intake. A dart to my throat.
Sometimes I wished the police would catch who did it, but honestly, sometimes I wished everyone would forget all about it. That I would forget, too. If they caught the who, then it would become real again. I would have to relive it.
Mrs. McIntyre was tsk-tsking. “All those robberies and nobody home and then . . . what are the chances Jane would get caught in the middle of all that? What if she’s still in danger? Aren’t you just terrified for her?”
The wedding dress turned into a sack of stones. It threatened to sink me. I didn’t want to hear any more about danger and break-ins, about my break-in, as I’d come to think about it. I wasn’t sure what was worse: gossip about Handel Davies and me, or the town tragedy, which was also my tragedy; ours, I guess, if you counted the fact that my mother used to be married, once, to my dad. I nudged the sewing room door open with my knee. The hinges creaked; the gossip stopped. Worried eyes, guilty eyes turned on me. I held up the gown in my shaky arms. “What should I do with this?”
My mother blinked. “Let me take that.”
I gave it to her, gently, carefully. If only all the weight in my life could be shifted to someone else this simply, this literally.
“Oh, it’s really lovely, Molly,” Mrs. McIntyre said, sounding relieved to go back to the real reason she’d come to my house, speaking my mother’s nickname, Molly, short for Amalia, like an Irish song from her mouth. She took some of the fabric into her hands and leaned close, inspecting the beading. “What gorgeous work. Sara is going to look beautiful on her wedding day.”
“I’m off to see the girls at Slovenska’s,” I said to my mother.
“Bye, Jane,” she said with raised eyebrows.
She was waiting to see what I’d heard. Checking to see if I was okay.
I nodded, one slight bob of my head.
Then, after a quick peck on her cheek, I headed out, just in time to hear Mrs. McIntyre whisper, “She’s such a lovely girl, Molly, but her eyes—they’re so sad.”
The screen door shut with a loud bang as I left the house, left my mother and Mrs. McIntyre to continue their gossip. Their words, though, trailed behind me as I walked, like the tail of a kite or the train of that ugly wedding dress. Pulling on me. Holding me down.