“I tried.”
She shook her head very slowly, looking at the stitching. “Dad.”
“Go try it on.”
She came back down fifteen minutes later wearing it, and he looked at her standing in his kitchen in a dress made from her mother’s wedding gown with blue flowers along the hem that he had embroidered himself with cracked plumber’s hands, and something in his chest felt both very full and very empty at the same time, which he recognized as a feeling that had no cure and required no cure.
“You look like your mother,” he said.
“That’s what I was hoping for,” she said, and her voice broke on the last word.
He put his hands gently on her shoulders. He had been trying to think of what to say for days, and in the end what came out was the simple thing, the true thing.
“She should be here for this. Since she can’t be, I wanted part of her to go with you.”
Maya pressed her face against his shoulder for a moment, which was how she had always cried since she was small, turned toward him rather than away, and he stood very still with his hands on her back and let her.The night of prom, he took photographs in the living room the way parents do, slightly formal and slightly embarrassed, and she was patient with him and let him take more than she would have normally, and they both understood without saying it that these were photographs she would keep forever.
He drove her to the venue. She got out of the car and looked back at him through the window for a moment, and he nodded at her, and she turned and walked toward the entrance with the ivory skirt moving around her legs and the blue flowers catching the light from the overhead lamps.
