Part 3 — Key in the Hem
I worked the small hard thing out of the hem with my sewing scissors, one tiny stitch at a time, while the whole table watched in silence. It was a brass key, no longer than my thumb, tarnished at the ridges. Wrapped around it was a scrap of paper in the handwriting of my mother: First Bank, Division Street, number 214. Vicki sat down very slowly. Curtis stared at the quiche as though it might explain something to him.
I held that key in my fist for the rest of the brunch. Nobody ate. When the plates were cleared, the daughter of Curtis followed me into the kitchen and whispered, “Aunt Sharon, I did not know about the money. I swear.” I believed her. Some people inherit the face of a family without inheriting any of its habits, and I was glad to see she had gotten the better half.
On Monday morning I sat across from a bank officer named Ms. Albright, with the letter of my mother in my purse. My mother had added my name to that safe deposit record in March, in blue ink, at the very desk where I sat. The signature card was still on file. Ms. Albright checked my identification twice, smiled, and led me down a hall to a steel door that opened with a sound like a sigh.
Inside the long metal drawer were more things than I had room to feel at once. There was the wristwatch of my father, a plain Bulova with a cracked leather band, and the pawn ticket proving that my mother had bought it back for two hundred and fifteen dollars from the shop where Curtis had sold it. There were her own wedding rings. There was a savings bond for six thousand dollars in the name of my granddaughter. And there was a promissory note for forty thousand dollars, signed by Curtis, with a notary stamp.
Underneath the note lay a folder of photographs, each one dated in March and labeled in her careful hand, every piece in her jewelry case, one after the other. A single item had been circled in red pencil: the opal ring that had belonged to her own mother. Beside it she had written, in the smallest letters I have ever seen from her: Gone since the Sunday Vicki helped me tidy. I sat on a bank chair with that folder open on my knees and cried quietly into my sleeve.
That evening I drove to the shop and asked Curtis to step into the back room. I did not shout. I laid it out the way a stylist reads a client the cost of a color: plainly, and with a price. The forty thousand dollars would come out of his share, exactly as Mom had written. He would repay me the four hundred and eighty dollars I spent buying the dress back, plus the shipping. And the opal ring would be returned within a week, in an envelope, no questions asked.
Vicki came the next morning. She was not wearing the new sundress, and I noticed that she had no makeup on. She put a padded envelope on my counter and, without being asked, a pair of pearl earrings beside it. “I took them in March,” she said. “We were behind on everything. The truck business was gone, and I was ashamed, and it seemed like the only way.” I told her that I understood being afraid, and that I did not understand taking, and both could be true.
Curtis came last. He sat in my chair, the one I keep for the nervous brides, and he told me why he had sold the dress. He could not bear to open the closet. Every time he stood in front of it he saw our mother standing there with her hands folded, and it was easier to turn the grief into money than to feel it. I said, “You could have called me.” He said, “I know.” That was nearly all of the conversation, and it was enough.
The lawyer arranged for him to repay the loan through the estate, over several years, with the house of our mother sold in the spring. Nobody went to court. In the folder I found one more letter, sealed, addressed to Curtis. I carried it to him unopened. He read it on the sidewalk, and when he finished he did not say a word. He folded it, put it in his shirt pocket, and walked back into the shop with his shoulders a little lower and straighter.
What a mother stitches into the quiet places of a family, love can still find when the loud places have all fallen silent.
She had added a note about the watch, too. Curtis, when you have gone one full year without selling anything that is not yours, Sharon will put this on your wrist. I kept it in a drawer by my station and told no one, including him. I wrote the date on my calendar. I want to say that I looked forward to it, and I did, though I looked forward to it the way you look forward to a seed coming up.
In June of the next year my granddaughter was married in a garden outside Spokane, in the ivory satin dress with forty-two buttons. I fastened every one of them myself, slowly, with a crochet hook, while the retired teacher from Toledo watched from a chair by the window. I had invited her, and she had come, and she cried before the music even began. Curtis stood at the end of the aisle in his good suit.
After the vows I took the old Bulova out of my purse, wound it, and fastened it on his wrist. He looked at it for a long time. Then he turned his arm over, the way our father used to, and held it up to the light of the late afternoon. “Thanks, Sharie,” he said quietly. Behind us, my granddaughter laughed, her skirt full of wind, and the little brass key hung on a ribbon around my neck.