“Another time, then.” After another awkward pause, he leaned in and kissed her cheek and headed on his way.
She drew in a breath and hobbled the rest of the way to Dog-Eared, wondering how it was possible that Riley could manage to scrub all the happiness right out of the day, in five minutes’ worth of conversation. She sighed and pasted on a smile as she opened the front door of the shop.
She found her mother ringing up a customer Claire didn’t know who was buying a tall stack of children’s books. “I think you’ll find your grandchildren will very much enjoy this author. I know when I read the books to my grandson, he thinks they’re a hoot.”
Claire waited, browsing through the new releases while her mother finished up.
“Oh, it’s been crazy in here all morning,” Ruth finally declared after the bells on the door chimed behind the customer. “I’m exhausted. I swear I haven’t had a minute to breathe today.”
“That’s what pays the rent, Mom.” She smiled. “I love the window display of gardening and wildflower books. So clever to use seed packets and real potted plants. Did you do that?”
Her mother looked pleased. “I did. I thought we needed a little something to remind us summer is almost here.”
“It really works together. I should have you come spruce up my window display at the bead store. You’ve got a real knack.”
Pleasure warmed her mother’s eyes, made her look years younger. “I’ll have to see. I’m pretty busy right now.”
The change in her mother astonished her. Ruth straightened the display Claire had just been looking over with a sense of proprietary pride.
“You’re really into this, aren’t you?”
Ruth shrugged as she aligned the books with the table’s edge “I think it’s mostly fun because I know it’s only temporary. Sage will be back from university for good in a week or so. She can take charge and I’ll fill in until Maura thinks she’s ready to come back.”
Claire hoped that would be soon, but Maura seemed a long way from ready to return to life.
“What did you want to show me?” she asked.
“Oh. Right. It’s in the back.”
With a careful look around the bookstore at the few browsing customers, she led the way to Maura’s stockroom, piled high with boxes, a hand truck, wire shelving.
From the quilted book tote Claire had given her mother for Mother’s Day a few weeks earlier, Ruth extracted a thin box.
“I know what you’re going to say before you even open your mouth. Let me just tell you I’ve given this a great deal of thought and I believe this is the right thing to do. I want to donate great-great-grandmother’s necklace and earrings for the auction.”
Claire gasped. “Mother! You can’t! You cherish those.”
When she was a girl, she was only allowed to even look at the antique jewelry set on very special occasions. “I wanted to talk to you about it because, really, it’s your legacy. If you don’t want me to donate it, I won’t.”
“It’s a piece of Hope’s Crossing history.”
She knew the story well. Her ancestor, Hope Goodwin Van Duran, had been the first schoolmistress when this area was just a hardscrabble mining camp. She’d fallen in love with a rough miner who had ended up owning the claim where the largest, most pure vein of silver in the entire canyon had been found. Their fortune had once rivaled any of the silver barons of the day.
Silas Van Duran had founded the town, naming it after his beloved wife. Poor investments and the depression had wiped out most of the family wealth, but out of silver mined from that original strike, Silas had commissioned a lovely necklace of fine-worked silver filigree, centered by a trio of semiprecious stones also culled from the mountains. Claire had loved the necklace. Sometimes she thought perhaps that was the inspiration for her own early fascination with jewelry and beading.
“I want to do this,” her mother said. “If it helps with the benefit, it’s a small sacrifice. I think great-great-grandmother Hope would have agreed.”
The generosity seemed so unlike her mother, Claire didn’t know what to say.
“Do you mind so much?” Ruth asked at her continued silence.
She felt a small pang of loss for the lovely piece, but her mother was right.
“We can place a fairly high reserve on it,” she suggested. “If it doesn’t look as if it will exceed the reserve, you can always hold it back and possibly donate it to a museum somewhere.”
“You would know more about that sort of thing than I do,” Ruth said. “The truth is, the actual value of the necklace is not more than a few hundred dollars, at least according to the appraisal I did a few years ago.”
“But historically, it’s priceless.”
“I’m hoping someone else in Hope’s Crossing will think so, as well.”
“Mother, thank you.”
“Just be careful with it. Put it in a safe place until the Giving Hope benefit.”