Part 3 — The Tiny Clock
The second page was the size of a recipe card, and Mama had written on it in her careful blue ink.
“Pippa, the tag is on the kitchen clock, the one the size of a button.”
Lenore was still holding her roll of stickers. Her husband, standing behind her, said, “Go on, Pippa.”
I carried the dollhouse to the dining table and lifted the roof the rest of the way off. In the little kitchen, above the stove, hung the clock.
A paper tag no bigger than a grain of rice was tied to its chain. It said, in Mamas smallest handwriting, “For Pippa.”
The back of the clock opened with a pin. Inside lay a folded square of paper, thin as an onion skin.
I unfolded it with a toothpick. It was a certificate of deposit at the Bangor Savings Bank, in my name, payable to me on the day of Mamas death. Sixty-two thousand dollars.
Below it was a line. “I saved this from the church bake sales and the Social Security, one envelope at a time, because I knew who would count the checkbook.”
The dining room was so quiet I could hear the real clock ticking in the hall.
Lenore looked at the tablecloth in the tiny kitchen, the one cut from my first school dress, and her shoulders began to shake.
She said she had written those checks to pay for her daughters tuition and then the bills had piled up. She said she had not known how to ask for help in a family where she was always the strong one.
Her husband did not make excuses for her. He said they would sell the lake camper and repay the estate every dollar.
The next Monday we met at the bank with the lawyer who had drawn up the will. The signed list was valid under Maine law, and every item went where Mama had written it. The ring and the car came to me, and Daddys clock went to Lenore.
The fourteen checks, twenty-three thousand dollars in all, were put on a payment schedule to be repaid to the estate. I told the lawyer to add no interest and no penalty.
The bank officer handed me the certificate, and I put it in my purse next to the toothpick.
That Christmas Eve, Lenore came to my kitchen carrying a brown paper bag. She had found a tiny wooden spoon at a craft fair, and she asked quietly whether the house might have room for one more thing.
I set it in the tiny kitchen drawer and said, “There. Now the house knows we are all coming home.”