The Pearls At My Mothers Visitation

We buried Mama on a Thursday, under a sky so clear and blue it almost felt disrespectful, no wind at all, just the preacher’s voice and the sound of my own family crying quiet into tissues. Danny stood on one side of the grave with Stephanie, who had, mercifully, left the pearls at the house that day, maybe out of some instinct even she could not ignore, maybe because Danny had finally said something to her the night before. I never asked. Some things you let lie if the result is right.

After the burial, everyone came back to the farmhouse, the one Daddy built onto twice over the years, the one Mama had lived in for fifty-six years and refused to leave even after her hip replacement made the stairs hard. Every counter in that kitchen filled up with casseroles and pound cakes and a ham someone’s husband had smoked overnight. Folding chairs came out of the hall closet. Children who did not understand why everyone was sad ran through the house anyway, the way children do, because grief has no power over a six-year-old’s need to chase his cousin around a dining table.

Pauline Ashworth came too, settling into Mama’s reading chair like she had done every week for sixty years, because she had. She and my mother grew up two houses apart on the same gravel road outside town, went through every grade of school together, stood up in each other’s weddings, buried each other’s parents, and talked on the phone most nights of their lives even after Pauline’s hearing started to go and she had to ask Mama to speak up. If anyone alive knew the whole truth of my mother’s life, it was Pauline.

I was in the kitchen wrapping leftover ham in foil when Nicole’s voice carried in from the front room, clear and easy, not accusing, just curious the way she gets when a question occurs to her mid-conversation.

“Aunt Steph,” she said, “did Grandma ever tell you where these came from?” I came to the doorway in time to see her gesturing at the pearls, which Stephanie had put back on that morning, apparently deciding the funeral itself called for sober black but the gathering afterward did not.

Stephanie laughed, a short, easy laugh, the kind that assumes the question is smaller than it is. “Gail’s dad bought them, I guess. Some anniversary or other.” She touched the strand the way she had at the viewing, like it belonged to her hands now. “They’re real nice, aren’t they? I always thought your grandmother had good taste.”