Marion then, at 12:47 AM on the morning of the wedding, did something I think might be the most practical act of motherly love I have ever heard of in my life. She went into the back of her closet. She pulled out, from a garment bag she had been preserving since 1987, her own wedding dress — a simple, hand-beaded ivory silk column dress she had bought in New York when she had married Jillian's father. She held it up. Jillian, she told me later, cried for about ten minutes and then said,

"Mom, I'm a size bigger than you were." Marion said, "I kept an extra four inches of silk in the hem the entire time. I had it custom-made with that in case." Marion had always known. At 1 AM, Marion and Jillian drove to an emergency seamstress Marion knew — a Vietnamese woman named Linh who had altered Marion's clothes for thirty-one years — and Linh, wearing pajamas and holding a cup of coffee and a thimble, let them into her studio. Linh fit the dress on Jillian at 2 AM. The dress, because Marion and Jillian had, over the years, ended up nearly the same size, required only the release of the reserve four inches. Linh let it out. Linh pressed it. Jillian got home at 4:30 AM. Jillian slept for two hours.