The Pearls At My Mothers Visitation
I did not grab them. I did not make a speech either. I let her hold her hand out there a second, and I looked at Danny, who nodded at me, a small nod that said he was with me whatever I decided, and I looked at Pauline, who watched me with the same patient, unhurried look she had given Stephanie a few minutes before.
“Keep your hand there a second,” I told Stephanie, and I turned to my daughter. “Nicole. Come here.”
She came and stood beside me, looking confused, and I took the pearls from Stephanie’s palm and set them in my daughter’s hands instead.
“These are going to you,” I told her. “Not because you’re owed them, and not to spite anybody. Because you’re twenty four, and you’re going to carry this family a long way past where any of us sitting in this room can see. Somebody ought to wear them who knows the whole story now, every bit of it, the roof and the pawn ticket and your grandfather on his knees in the gravel in the dark. That’s worth more than the pearls. I want you to have both.”
Nicole’s eyes filled up. She looked at the strand in her hands like it had grown heavier in the last ten minutes, which I suppose, in every way that mattered, it had.
Stephanie was crying by then too, quiet, no scene, no drama, just an honest person sitting with what she had done and what she had just learned. “I’m sorry,” she said again, to the room this time, not just to me. “I really am. I should have asked somebody before I put them on. I should have asked a lot of things before today.”
“You didn’t know,” Pauline said gently, from her chair. “Now you do. That’s how most of us learn anything worth knowing. Dorothy never held a grudge past the hour it took her to figure out the person was sorry, and she buried plenty of hours worth holding grudges over things a good deal worse than a necklace. I expect she’d tell you the same, if she could.”
Danny got up then and crossed the room and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder, and said, quiet enough that I almost missed it, “I should have told you some of that myself, a long time ago. I didn’t think to. I’m sorry too.” It was the most I had heard my brother say about anything in longer than I could remember, and it told me he had been carrying some version of this conversation inside himself for years, waiting for an opening he did not know how to make for himself.