“Yes, but it’s six in the morning,” I said. “What happened? I’m her mother.”
The girl looked up at me then. And something about her face stopped me cold. It was painfully familiar. The shape of her eyes. The little dent in her chin. I knew that face from somewhere. I just couldn’t place it.
The woman’s chin trembled.
“You don’t know why Lily really gave Annie that dress?”
“To help her,” I said. “Lily told me what’s been happening at school.”
The woman started to cry. Not loudly. Just tears running down her face while she stood very still on my porch. She reached into her coat pocket and held out a small box.
The moment I saw it, I went pale. I felt the blood leave my face. I actually had to put my hand on the doorframe.
Because I knew that box too.
“You don’t know your daughter at all,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I have to tell you this…”
To understand what she told me, you have to go back four nights.
Back to the sewing machine.
Since my husband, Michael, died, it’s been just me and Lily.
He had a heart attack three years ago. He was forty-four. He was standing in the kitchen making coffee on a Saturday morning, and he said, “Huh. That’s weird,” and put his hand on his chest. Then he sat down on the floor. By the time the ambulance came, he was gone.
Lily was thirteen. She was the one who called 911. I was too busy screaming.
After that, everything changed. Michael had been the one who made decent money. He sold insurance for a big company downtown and he was good at it. I worked part-time doing medical billing for a dental office. When he died, it turned out the life insurance wasn’t as much as we thought, and the mortgage was more. We sold the house and moved into a two-bedroom rental on the other side of town. I went full-time. Then I picked up weekend shifts too.
I couldn’t give Lily everything. Not the new phone every other girl had. Not the trips. Not the brand-name jeans.
But I made sure she never doubted she was loved. Every single day. That was the one thing I could afford.
Lily loved to sew. She got that from Michael’s mother, Ruth, who taught her on an old Singer when she was eight. When Ruth moved into assisted living, she gave Lily the machine. Lily treated it like it was made of gold. She cleaned it every week with a little brush.
She wanted to be a fashion designer. She had sketchbooks full of dresses. She watched videos of runway shows the way other kids watched video games. For two years, she’d been saving every dollar she earned from hemming pants and fixing prom dresses for people in our building. She kept it in a coffee can under her bed. It was for a summer design program in New York. Six weeks. She’d been dreaming about it since she was fourteen.
“Eleven hundred dollars,” she told me in September. “I’m almost halfway there.”
I was so proud of her I could barely stand it.
But for several nights, she had been staying up late working on a dress that wasn’t for her.
I noticed on Sunday. I got up to get water around midnight, and the light was still on under her door. I could hear the soft chunk-chunk-chunk of the sewing machine.
On Monday, the same.
