Part 3 — What The Hem Held
Inside the hem, wrapped flat in plastic, were three things. A small savings passbook, a sealed envelope, and a photograph of a baby girl in a yellow knitted cap.
The passbook was from a credit union in Wilkes-Barre, opened in 1974 and fed fifteen and twenty dollars at a time from every alteration my mother ever did. The balance, with fifty years of interest, was a little over one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Fifty years of pins in her mouth, and my mother had been a saver the whole time.
The envelope was addressed in her hand: For Glenn, and read aloud only if Paulette is in the room. I read it standing at the front of the chapel with a hundred and forty brides listening.
Mom wrote that when she was nineteen, before she met my father, she had a baby girl and was not able to keep her. She placed her for adoption with a family in Allentown and signed the papers with a broken heart. She never told us because, she wrote, she was afraid we would think less of her.
The baby was the woman in the wedding dress. Her name was Naomi. She had found my mother ten years earlier and the two of them had met quietly, every month, in the front room, over alterations that did not need doing.
The dress was Moms own, but she had never put it in my fathers casket. She had made a copy for him. Her own dress she kept, and she asked Naomi to wear it on the day she died, so the daughter she had given up could walk down the aisle her mother never could.
Paulette had known. She had found the adoption papers in a drawer when she was sixteen and had never forgiven my mother for keeping a secret, or Naomi for existing. Her anger was never really about money, it was about a door she thought had been closed to her.
The funeral director put a hand on Paulettes shoulder, and she sat down in the front pew. Naomi came over and knelt beside her. She said, I never wanted anything from this family except to know where I came from. Paulette said nothing for a full minute, and then she took her sisters hand.
The passbook belonged to all three of us, and Mom had written that in the envelope too. One third each. Naomi tried to refuse hers. Paulette, of all people, put the passbook into her hand and closed her fingers over it.
We used part of the money to fix the roof on Prospect Avenue, the roof Paulette had said could never be afforded. The rest went into a fund in Moms name that sews bridal gowns for women who cannot pay for one.
The hundred and forty brides stayed for the luncheon in the church hall, and nobody ate cookies off a paper plate. Paulette served the ham herself.
Before she left, Naomi stood in the front room beside the old sewing machine, touched the worn spot on the treadle, and said it felt like coming home. Then she took the yellow knitted cap from her purse and set it on the sill, beside the pin cushion, where it stayed.