The Pearls At My Mothers Visitation

The line kept moving, the way receiving lines do, each face in front of me asking for a small piece of my attention I was not sure I had left to give. Mrs. Holloway from two farms over told me Mama had taught her to can green beans the right way, with a pressure cooker instead of the old open kettle method that scared half the county into botulism stories every summer. A man I half recognized from the elevator, one of Daddy’s old coworkers, shook my hand with both of his and said Raymond Whitfield had taught him everything he knew about a tractor’s hydraulic system and never once acted like he minded the extra time it took. I thanked every one of them, and meant it, and the whole time some small cold corner of my mind kept counting the seconds until I could look away from that strand of pearls without seeming to look away on purpose.

My brother Danny stood near the casket the whole afternoon, shaking hands, thanking people for coming, and if he noticed what his wife was wearing, he gave no sign of it. I caught his eye once, over the heads of two women from the quilting circle, and something passed between us, something that told me he had noticed, and that he, too, had decided this was not the hour. Danny has never been a man who raises his voice in public. He takes after Daddy that way. I did not fault him for standing quiet. I understood it. I was standing just as quiet myself.

My daughter Nicole came straight from her classroom, still in the cardigan she teaches first grade in, and found me at the edge of the room during a lull in the line. She is twenty four, sharp as a tack, and she had clocked the pearls the second she walked in.

“Mom,” she whispered, gripping my elbow. “Are those Grandma’s?”

“They are.”

“Is Aunt Steph wearing them to the viewing?”

“She is.”

Nicole’s jaw did something that reminded me so much of my own mother it nearly undid me right there. “Did you say anything?”

“No. And I’m not going to. Not here.”

She studied me a second, the way she does when she is deciding whether to trust a grown-up’s judgment, and then she nodded and squeezed my arm and went to sign the guest book. Forty-two names were in it by noon, I found out later, counting every one.

Tom stayed close the rest of the afternoon, saying little, doing what he always does, which is make himself useful. He fetched water for Pauline Ashworth, Mama’s oldest friend, when her hip started bothering her from standing. He walked old Mr. Deeter to his truck when the man’s eyes went red and his hands started shaking too hard to find his keys. Once, near the end of the receiving line, I saw him stop beside Danny and say something short, just a few words, and Danny’s face colored and he looked down at his shoes. I asked Tom about it that night, lying in the dark of our own bedroom.