Hannah pried the little gold locket open with her thumbnail, and she held it up in the light of the late afternoon so that everyone close to her could see. On the left was a young woman in a pillbox hat, laughing, from some Sunday in 1946. On the right was a baby in a christening cap, no bigger than a peach. “Aunt Loretta,” Hannah said, her voice gone small, “this is your mother, is it? And this is you.”
It was. My mother had worn that locket on her wedding day, a gift from my father, and in time she had slipped in a picture of herself and, later, one of me. It had lived in her jewelry box beside the velvet pouch for sixty years. I had searched for it since Easter and told myself I had misplaced it. I said quietly that I had worn it once, on my own wedding day, and that I had loved it very much.
Bev sat down on a folding chair as though her legs had been cut from under her. She turned the locket over and over in her hands. Then she looked at her brother, and her face did something I had never seen it do. “Glenn,” she said, “what else did you give me? What else did you hand me with that sweet smile and tell me it was an antique?” He tried to answer and could not.
Hannah answered for him, because she is a good deal like her mother and kinder than her aunt ever had to be. “Uncle Glenn,” she said, “there is a brooch, is it, and a pair of garnet earrings, and probably more. You are going to bring every piece back to Aunt Loretta by Sunday.” The yard had gone completely still. A child at the far end of the lawn was laughing at a bubble, and the sound seemed to come from another country.
Bev unclasped the chain and put the locket into my palm with both hands. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I thought it was a gift.” I told her I knew. I told her that nobody could blame the one who received a thing she believed was honest. She was weeping openly now, the mascara running, and I found in myself nothing but pity. The anger I had expected to feel never arrived. It had worn itself out sometime in the spring.
That night Glenn sat at our kitchen table with his hands wrapped around a coffee mug. He told me everything. A year ago Bev had lent him four thousand dollars for the roof, and when she asked for it back he had been too proud to say that he had no way to pay. So he had gone into the jewelry box of my mother, one piece at a time, and given Bev the items as presents, pretending to be generous. Nobody had counted the pieces, he said, and that was the worst of it.
He put four pawn tickets on the tablecloth, creased from his coat pocket. The brooch. The earrings. A ring I had forgotten. A bracelet. The shop was on Maple Street, and it was owed one hundred and eighty dollars to release them all. I looked at the little slips of paper and thought of my mother, who kept every receipt in a shoebox and who would have known to the penny what had been taken.
I told him what I needed, and I said it the way I read a ledger at the feed store. He would redeem every piece himself, from the spending money of his pension, by Friday. He would repay Bev the four thousand dollars in honest cash, two hundred a month, with a note she could keep. He would apologize to her and to Hannah in person. And he would see our pastor, weekly, until the pastor told us to stop. He nodded at each point, and his hands trembled.
By Friday afternoon all four pieces lay on my dresser, each one polished, with a little receipt tucked beside. I put the brooch and earrings back in the jewelry box of my mother. The locket I wore to church on Sunday, and Bev, seeing it, crossed the aisle after the service and pressed my hand. We did not say anything. There are things a person cannot say in a church, and some things she does not need to.
What is taken in the dark can be carried back into the light, if the heart that took it is ready to be honest.
Glenn kept every promise. He mailed Bev her first two hundred dollars with a note that said Thank you for waiting. I watched him change in small ways. He began to ask me before he did things. He stopped changing the channel when I came into the room. It was not a miracle. It was a slow, ordinary repair, the kind that is made one day at a time, and I was grateful for each of those days.
In December my daughter called from Denver on a Tuesday night. “Mom,” she said, and I heard her take a breath, “you are going to be a grandmother.” I put the phone down on the counter and went to the top drawer. The velvet pouch was there, blue and soft, with the silver baby piece inside, the little rose on the handle catching the light. I held it up and said aloud, to the kitchen and to my mother, “Someday, honey, we will feed your grandbaby with this.”
