What my mother said to them, specifically, I don’t know. I found out it had happened when Aunt Susan called me to say she’d heard the full story and wanted me to know she understood.
My mother and I talked again the following week. She apologized. The apology was not perfect — it was not quite clean all the way through; there were moments where I could feel her wanting to explain herself rather than apologize, and she did not manage to fully separate those two things — but there was something real in it. She said she had told herself a story about what I would want, rather than asking me what I wanted, and that she understood now that those were different things.
“You’ve done this with Elise and me before,” I said. “Not always in big ways. But in small ways. You decide what I’ll be okay with and don’t check.”
“I know,” she said.
“I need you to check.”
“I know, Mara.”
“This is the thing I need to know you understand: not the dress, specifically. The pattern.”
Silence. “I know,” she said again, and this time it was quieter. Less like she was agreeing with me and more like she was admitting something to herself.
We are not done working on this. It is the kind of conversation that you have in installments, not all at once. But we are having it, which is something we have not always managed to do.
## The Repair
I started on the sleeve cuff repair six weeks after I got the dress back.