After my divorce, I couldn’t afford a store-bought prom dress, so I stayed up night after night sewing one on my late mother’s old machine. Then my ex-husband showed up at my door with the woman he left me for and she was carrying a garment bag. She thought she came to humiliate me. She didn’t know my daughter was digging herself.
Part 1
A few years ago, I discovered that my husband, Clark, was cheating on me with his personal trainer, Alice.
I wish I could say the divorce was the worst. It was only the beginning.
The resulting stress and money problems sunk my small business within a year. Then my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I went into debt to pay for his treatment, and I would have gone much further if it had helped me.
This is not the case. She died anyway.
For a long time, grief and financial worries fed off each other. Some evenings I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by envelopes I couldn’t bring myself to open, and each one seemed like another conversation I could never finish with Mom.
When this story begins, I was working as a cashier at a grocery store. Clark’s child support helped, but it was never extensive enough. My only real goal was to make sure my seventeen-year-old daughter, Olivia, never felt like our life was reduced to the size of my bank account.
I became good at minor mathematics. Everything under the store brand. Coupons clipped during my lunch break. The gas brought in ten dollars at a time. Most of the time I could make it work. Olivia never complained, which made the situation worse. She had quietly stopped asking for things, and I noticed it every time.
Then prom season arrived. And I knew right away that the dress was going to be a problem.
One evening, Olivia was sitting at the kitchen table scrolling through dresses on her phone.
“This one is cute,” she said, turning the screen towards me.
It was cute. It was also $340.
I laughed before I could stop myself.
She looked up. “Too much?”
“Only if we plan to keep eating.”
She smiled, because Olivia always lets me go easily. But I saw her face fall for just a second before she put the phone away, and that second stayed with me all night.
Around midnight, I opened the hall closet and took out my mother’s old sewing machine. I hadn’t touched it in years. I put it on the table, wiped the dust with my sleeve, and looked at it for a while.
The next morning, I asked Olivia what she would think of me making her dress.
She blinked through her cereal. “Can you make a ball gown?” »
“I can make something in the shape of a dress.”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious.”
She hesitated and I could see her trying to figure out how to be nice about it. So I added, “You have complete veto power. If it seems terrible, we’ll find something else. No feelings of hurt.”
Slowly, she smiled. “All right.”
That weekend we went to the fabric store and found a piece of dark green satin. Olivia held a length of it against her in the mirror at the end of the aisle.
“This color?” she asked.
“It’s perfect.”
And she smiled. A real one, the kind I hadn’t seen much of since his grandmother died.
At the checkout, the woman in front of us was buying three yards of something shiny for a costume. She took one look at our green satin and said, “Prom? Olivia nodded. “My mother makes it happen.” She said it like it was a brag. Like I’m some kind of designer. I had to look at my wallet so no one would see my face.
This smile cost me less than forty dollars. Everything else costs sleep.
I was working closing hours at the store, so I’d come home around ten, eat something standing up, and then sew until one or two in the morning. My feet hurt after eight hours on a concrete floor, and my eyes burned under the kitchen light. I ripped the zipper off twice. I cut a panel wrong and had to come back for more fabric. I pricked my fingers so often that I no longer noticed. But these late hours gradually became ours. Olivia curled up on the nearby couch with her homework or her phone while the machine hummed between us.
She spent many of those nights looking through prom photos online. Once or twice I glanced over and noticed she was buried in what looked like someone’s old photo albums. I thought she was looking for ideas.
I didn’t think about it anymore. I should have.
One night, about halfway through, I sat looking at the unfinished bodice and suddenly started crying. I couldn’t stop.
Olivia was beside me in seconds. “Mom?”
I wiped my face quickly. “It’s good.”
She looked at the fabric rolled up under the needle. “Isn’t this working?”
“No. It works.”
“Then why are you crying?”
I didn’t want to tell him. It was my mother who taught me to sew, on this same machine, when I was younger than Olivia. I could still hear his voice over my shoulder, correcting my crooked stitches.
To slow down. Clean first, quick second.
Olivia sat down next to me. “Grandmother?”
I nodded.
She rested her head on my shoulder. “We can stop. Really. I don’t need to.”
“No.”
“Mom.”
“No,” I repeated. “We are in the process of finishing it.”
And we would. But first, I did something I promised myself I’d never do.
I picked up the phone and asked my ex-husband for help.
