Kristen stood up slowly, and her napkin slid off her lap onto the floor. She did not look at me. She looked at her father, and in a voice with all the starch gone out of it she said, “Dad, there are some boxes in my trunk.” Her husband closed his eyes. Joan, who had pushed the lilies across the table with such grace only a minute before, put a hand over her mouth and sat very still.
We all went out to the driveway, eleven of us in our Easter clothes, and Kristen opened the lid of her car with a hand that would not stay steady. There were three cardboard boxes, packed carefully in newspaper. In the first lay the silver tea service of my mother. In the second, a cameo ring, a music box that played a waltz, and two linen tablecloths with violets stitched along the border. In the third were framed photographs of my own family, wrapped in a bath towel.
Eight things in all. I had noticed some of them missing and told myself I was getting forgetful. I had stood in front of the guest room dresser at Christmas and counted the drawers twice. I had said nothing to Walt, because I did not want to be the stepmother who accused. Now I stood in the April sun looking at the life of my mother lying in a car trunk, and I did not feel anger. I felt a long, dull ache.
Kristen tried to explain, and it was painful to hear. She said she had thought these were things from the old house, from the marriage of her parents, and that Frances had simply kept them. She had told herself she was bringing them home to her mother. But when she unwrapped the tea service in the car, she said, she saw the initials engraved on the tray. F.M. Frances Marie. And she had put the cloth back over it and driven on anyway.
Walt did something I had not seen him do in twenty-seven years of marriage. He did not smooth it over. He asked Joan to come inside, and he went to his desk and returned with a manila folder, yellow at the edges. It held the divorce decree from 1986 and the inventory that both of them had signed, line by line, dividing what they owned. He laid it on the dining table beside the lilies and asked Joan to read it.
She read it all, her lips moving slightly. When she looked up, her eyes were wet. “I signed this, Walter,” she said. “Everything on it is mine, and I took it all with me. Nothing in those boxes is on this list.” She turned to her daughter, and the look on her face was one of the saddest I have ever seen on a mother. “Kristen, I raised you better than this. I did not want any of it. I never asked.”
She came around the table to me and took both of my hands. “Frances, I am so sorry. I should have known my daughter was carrying something she could not put down.” I thanked her. I told her it was not her fault, and that she had been gracious to give back the blue glass without a quarrel. We looked at each other, two women who had been strangers for a quarter of a century, and I saw that she was exactly as tired as I was.
Walt turned to me last. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Fran, I said it was only glass,” he said. “I said do not start a war over a flower pot. It was never a flower pot. It was the first thing I gave you on the first day of the rest of my life, and I let my daughter tell a lie about it because I wanted a quiet table.” His voice cracked. “I have been choosing quiet over you for twenty-seven years.”
I did not forgive him on the spot, and I did not punish him either. I asked Kristen to carry the boxes back into the house, one at a time, and to put every piece where it belonged. She did, with her husband carrying the heaviest, and it took more than an hour. She replaced the tablecloths in the cedar chest and hung the photographs, straightening each one. When she reached the windowsill, she stood very still with the cobalt glass in both hands.
“When Dad married you, I was twelve,” she said, not turning around. “I thought I had lost him. And I think I never stopped being twelve.” I had been a school nurse for thirty-three years. I know a hurt child when I hear one, even in a woman of thirty-nine. I crossed the kitchen and stood beside her. “Set it down gently,” I said, “and let the sun come through.” She did. The cobalt glass lit up blue across the sink.
What is given with love on a wedding morning cannot be taken by anyone, because the light still comes through it.
Joan and I sat on the porch with tea that evening, and she told me she had once been given a toaster for an anniversary. We laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. When she left, she wrote her phone number on a napkin and pressed it into my hand. On the first of June, the anniversary of Walt and me, a card arrived from Kristen. Inside, in her upright hand, she had written: Something blue, for the woman who stayed.