“Then let’s get the dress back.”
“There’s already been a cut.”
“I know.” He came around the counter and stood next to me, not touching, just near. “Do you know how much is cut?”
“No. Mom wasn’t specific and I don’t want to get the details from her. I’ll need to see it.”
“Okay.”
“She also wants me to do the alterations. Herself. My mother. She wants me to finish altering my own dress so Elise can wear it.”
Ben was quiet for a moment. “Did she say it that way.”
“She said it would be such a help and that I would know the dress better than Rosa.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re getting the dress back,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And we’re not doing the alterations.”
“No,” I said. “We are definitely not doing the alterations.”
## A Brief Detour Into What My Mother Is Like
I want to be fair to my mother here, not in the way of making excuses for what happened, but in the way of being accurate. She is not a malicious person. She is a person who has a specific and longstanding relationship with fairness that favors Elise in ways she has never fully examined.
Elise is the younger one. Elise struggled more — with school, with friendships, with a rough patch in her mid-twenties that I’m not going to detail here because it’s not mine to detail. My mother spent years in a kind of heightened attention toward Elise, a constant low-level vigilance that calcified over time into something that looks, from the outside, like favoritism, because it is favoritism. Not conscious, not malicious, but real.