When I saw my stepmother come into the living room wearing a dress identical to mine, I felt something inside me breaking.
It wasn’t just the same color.
It was not similar.
It was an exact copy.
The same blue sky.
The same diani neckline.
The same fall of the skirt.
He had even copied the small hand-sewn details near the waist.
But Shirley had made a mistake.
As I walked to me smiling, convinced that I had just ruined the most important night of my adolescence, she didn’t realize that Gary was already talking to the sound manager.
Nor did he see that the huge screen behind the scenes had just turned on.
Minutes later, almost two hundred people would find out where that dress had actually come from.
And Shirley would stop smiling.
But to understand why that meant so much to me, I have to tell you about my mom.
