“I will, too,” she said, nodding. Then she reached for one of the dresses beside her on the bed. “Wear this one,” she suggested, holding up a black pullover with embroidered flowers along the bodice that fell to just below my knees. I always felt like a flamenco dancer when I was wearing it.
“It’s not too, I don’t know, frivolous?” It was a testimony to how out of sorts I was that season that I was even considering the fashion advice of my kid sister.
“No. Besides Mom liked it.”
“Mom did.”
Our father had had our mother—or, to be precise, what was left of our mother—cremated. The small urn with her ashes was going to be buried after the service in the Bartlett Cemetery. My father and Paige and I had picked out a spot on a hill that got a lot of sun. It was in the newer section—the original cemetery had plots dating back to 1785—but there was a hydrangea nearby and we all liked the irony.
I heard my grandfather’s heavy walk on the corridor and then on the stairs. He wasn’t a big man and he wasn’t an especially old man. He was only seventy-six then. But he had outlived his daughter, a tragedy no parent should have to endure, and he had aged worse than any of us that autumn. Twice I had found him crying softly in our house. My grandmother was usually oblivious, which may have been a blessing for her, but it was devastating for me to witness. She was seventy-four and, it seemed to me, extraordinarily beautiful. Like her daughter, she was tall, though her hair by then was a lush alabaster mane that fell to her shoulders and that my grandfather brushed in the morning and evening. She was slender, and her eyes remained electric—undimmed, despite the way her mind was failing. She was, I had deduced as a very young girl, the source of my mother’s charisma.
“I will keep my eyes out at the service,” I reassured Paige. I had no expectations that I would learn anything, but I felt a deep pang when I looked at her, and I wanted her to know I was listening.
Before we left the house, I found Paige and brought her to our parents’ bedroom. I waved my arm theatrically over our mother’s dresser and the jewelry there, as if I were a genie who had just made a small mountain of precious stones appear in the desert.
“Take something,” I said. “For the funeral—and, I guess, forever.”
“We can’t just take Mom’s jewelry,” she said, uncharacteristically aghast.
“Why not? Eventually Dad will just divvy it up between us. Besides, the seriously valuable stuff is in the safe deposit box at the bank.” To show her that I meant business, I took the cable bracelet with the blue topaz and cuffed it over my wrist. “I view this as a tribute.”
“I view it as theft.”
“Oh, please.”
She looked around the room as if she wanted to be sure that no one was watching us, and then reached for the charm bracelet. “Everyone will know it was hers,” she said.
“That’s exactly the point.”
I had to help her with the clasp that first time, but over the following weeks she learned to do it by herself. She didn’t really have places to wear it, but she liked having it with her. She kept it in her swim bag some days and in her school knapsack on others. And then there were the days when she just wore it around the house, an amalgam of mourning and dress-up.