Nobody said a word for what felt like a full minute. Chrissy put her fingers to the little gold locket at her throat as if it had grown hot. Aunt June folded the glasses she had been holding and said, in the dry, calm voice of a woman who has outlived three husbands, “Wilma, honey, how many things are missing from your house?” I had not counted. I had been afraid to. But I did not need to count to know that the answer was more than one.
I took a pen from my purse and wrote on the back of a shower napkin, standing at the gift table. The hand glass of my grandmother. The locket. A cameo brooch that had been missing since last spring. A cut-glass bowl. Two linen tablecloths, embroidered with violets. The recipe tin of my grandmother. A silver thimble set in a little case. I stopped, and I counted. Seven. Seven things from my house since Christmas two years ago, and I had blamed myself for every one of them.
Bev stood in the middle of her own living room with her lips pressed together. She tried to say that I must have misplaced them, and then that I never used them anyway. Then she stopped trying. “They are family things,” she said at last. “They belong in the family. You never wore them, Wilma. They were just sitting there. I thought if I gave them to people who would appreciate them, it would keep them alive.”
I answered her as gently as I could. “Bev, my grandmother raised me when no one else could. Those were not things sitting there. They were her. They were the only way I had left to keep her in the house.” My voice shook, but I let it. “If you had asked, I would have shared anything I could. But you went in with a key, without telling me, and took what was mine.” Bev looked at the carpet. A tear slid off her chin.
Doug had stood by the kitchen door the entire time, still and silent. Now he walked across the room and held out his hand to his mother. “The spare, Mom,” he said. She stared at him. “I know you have it on the ring in your purse.” Slowly, with a shaking hand, Bev took out her keys, found the brass one with the red tape, and worked it off. Doug closed it in his fist. Then he turned to me. “Wilma, I am sorry. I said it was only a dresser. I did not hear you.”
The recovery took a week. Chrissy returned the hand glass and the locket on the spot, with tears, and Bev brought the brooch in her purse and the tablecloths in a laundry basket. The thimbles were in a drawer in her sewing room, tucked in the same case. Only the recipe tin and the bowl were gone. The tin had gone to a cousin in Evansville, who mailed it back with a lovely note. The bowl had been donated to the church rummage sale.
Bev drove to the church herself and asked the volunteer at the table whether she remembered a cut-glass bowl. The woman did, and had set it aside because it was too pretty to sell for a dollar. Bev bought it back for eight dollars, out of her own purse, and brought it to my door wrapped in newspaper. She stood on the porch with her hands folded and did not ask to come in. “It is all there now,” she said. “Seven. I counted twice.”
I asked her to sit. We drank coffee on the porch, two women in their sixties who had known each other for decades and had never once said what mattered. I told her she was welcome at our table any Sunday for the rest of her life. But she would not have a key, and she would not take what was not offered. She nodded, and she wiped her eyes, and she said, “That seems fair.” I think it was the first time we had ever understood each other.
Chrissy sent a note too. She wrote that she was sorry she had worn the locket without asking, and that she would never again accept a gift without knowing where it came from. A week later a package came in the mail for my grandniece, a soft baby blanket she had stitched by hand, yellow with a white border. I put it in my cedar chest alongside the tablecloths. Some gifts are worth waiting for.
What is kept in love is never lost, and what is returned in honesty is worth more than what was never taken.
In June, Aunt June came to visit, her cane tapping along my front walk. She asked to see the hand glass, and I carried it to the table. She held it up to the light, turned it over, and read the back one more time. For my Wilma. Count to a hundred. “She knew,” June said softly. “She knew exactly who would need it.” We sat together at the dresser where it had stood for twenty-eight years.
That evening my granddaughter spent the night. I sat her on the stool in front of the dresser, handed her the hand glass, and took the brush. “Hold it up,” I said, “so you can see.” I brushed her long hair in slow strokes, and I counted aloud, as my grandmother had, one, two, three, all the way to a hundred. She giggled at the sixtieth and fell quiet by the eightieth. At the end I kissed the top of her head, and the old silver caught the lamplight.
