Fifty-six years. That was how long it had been since I last felt the cold brass of that transit bench under my wool coat and watched the tail-lights of the five-fifteen bus dissolve into the late autumn drizzle on Third Street. I was sixteen back then, wearing a hand-me-down corduroy skirt that smelled like cedar chips and mothballs, and I was carrying a small black leather purse that belonged to my aunt Martha. Inside that purse was my whole world, or at least the only part of it that mattered after April of that year: a rectangular gold locket on an eighteen-inch snake chain, inside of which was the only known photograph of my mother alone.
It was taken the Easter before she died, out by the hydrangeas behind the old parsonage, her head tilted just an inch to the left as she listened to my father tell some foolish joke about the neighbor’s Rhode Island reds. When I stood up from the bench to chase after my dropped notebook, the clasp had given out, or perhaps the ring had simply sheared through from the weight of my grief. I checked the transit office every Saturday for four months until the grey-haired clerk with the yellowed teeth finally told me to stop coming because people did not turn in gold, not in a town where the mill was laying off fifty men a week. I learned to live without the metal against my collarbone, replacing the phantom weight with an empty space that stayed cold even in July.
Last Tuesday, at four minutes past two in the afternoon, I was standing in the middle of the Kroger produce aisle trying to decide if the Gala apples looked mealy or crisp when a woman I had never laid eyes on in my seventy-two years stepped directly into my personal space.
She was not rushing, nor did she have the frantic, hurried shuffle of the usual Tuesday afternoon crowd that came in right after the senior center bingo let out. She wore a heavy navy blue cardigan that looked like it had been washed twenty times too many, the bottom button fastened into the second-to-last buttonhole so the hem skewed crooked across her waist. Her hair was a clean, bright silver, cut short around ears that wore small pearl studs, and her fingers were dry and spotted with the pale parchment freckles of old age. Before I could ask her to move her cart around my basket of lemons, she reached up with a hand that did not shake in the least and lifted a small, battered oval of yellowed fourteen-karat gold from beneath the lapel of her sweater. She did not say a word at first. She simply used the thumbnail of her left hand to flick open the tiny latch, and the brassy hinge made a faint, high-pitched click that seemed to cut right through the rhythmic roar of the overhead refrigeration units and the electronic chirp of the checkout scanners fifty yards away.
The face inside was twenty-eight years old, framed by soft curls that had been set with wire pins the night before Easter, looking up at the sky with that private, half-secret smile that belonged only to the moments before my father made her laugh. It was my mother. The same small mole just below the left corner of her lip, the same slight shadow beneath her cheekbones where she always carried too much work and too little sleep. I stood there with my hand frozen over my yellow mesh produce bag, my jaw dropping slightly because my brain simply refused to connect the grocery floor beneath my orthopedic shoes with the grease-stained floorboards of the Third Street bus depot in 1968. I looked from the oval frame to the woman’s face, searching for some line of bone or some familiar angle that would tell me she was a cousin I had forgotten or a long-lost daughter of someone my aunt used to know.
Her eyes were a pale, washed-out blue, watery at the corners like old glass, and they were fixed on me with a terrifying kind of clarity that made me want to take two steps back toward the celery. She held the chain suspended between us like a scale, the delicate links catching the harsh fluorescent glare of the ceiling bulbs and turning it into something hard and yellow.
“You’re Clara,” the woman said softly. Her voice was thin and dry, rasped by years of toast and black coffee, but every syllable dropped into the space between us with the heavy, unhurried thud of a grandfather clock in an empty hallway. “You have to be Clara. I’d know those eyes anywhere.”
“I am Clara,” I whispered, and the words felt small and foolish inside my own mouth, like I was six years old and confessing to breaking a jar of blackberry preserves on the kitchen linoleum. “How… where did you find this?”
The woman gave a small, weary nod that seemed to acknowledge fifty-six years of missed trains and empty Saturdays without actually dwelling on them. She gestured with a tilt of her silver head toward the quiet end of the aisle where the dairy cooler ended and the empty folding chairs by the pharmacy consultation window waited for people who were too tired to stand in line. Her name was Eleanor, she told me as she took my elbow with a grip that was surprisingly firm for someone whose coat sleeves were frayed at the cuffs. She didn’t let go of the locket, keeping the gold cradled in her palm like a bird’s egg while she guided me away from the pyramid of Gala apples and toward the quiet corner by the blood pressure machine. The noise of the store, the squeaking plastic wheels of a teenager’s cart, the static-heavy voice of the manager calling for a price check on canned peaches, gradually receded into a dull, thrumming background murmur that sounded very much like the wind through the tall pines behind our old house on the ridge.
“My legs aren’t what they used to be,” Eleanor said as we sat down on the scuffed brown vinyl bench, the springs groaning under our combined weight. “And I figured yours were about to give out based on the way your knees started shaking the second I opened that latch.”
“They are,” I admitted, looking down at my hands because I didn’t trust what my face was doing. “I haven’t seen that picture since I was sixteen years old. My father took it with his old Argus camera behind the parsonage four months before she died of the aneurysm in the kitchen. I lost it at the bus stop on Third Street the autumn after the funeral. I went back every Saturday until the snow started falling, and the man behind the counter told me nobody ever brought back anything made of gold.”
Eleanor laid the opened locket flat on her knee, resting her spotted palm over it as if she were afraid a sudden draft might blow the image away into the linoleum cracks. “The man behind the counter probably put it in his pocket,” she said without rancor or judgment. “Or maybe he didn’t even see it fall between the wooden slats of the bench. But twenty-two years later, in the summer of 1990, I bought a cigar box full of odd keys, broken watch bands, and tarnished buttons at an estate auction in Louisville. The man running the sale said he’d cleared out the house of an old mechanic who worked the regional bus lines for forty years before retiring to a small trailer out by the river. The locket was at the bottom of the box, wedged inside an old tin tobacco tin with the clasp jammed shut by thirty years of pocket lint and copper grease.”
A strange, cold feeling crawled up the back of my neck, the kind of prickling sensation you get when you realize someone has been standing behind you in the dark for a long time without making a sound. “A mechanic,” I said, the word tasting like dry iron on my tongue. “My father knew every man who worked out of that garage because his brother hauled timber for the state line. He probably handed it to him to fix a latch on a trunk or just dropped it on the floorboards while he was digging for his change.”
“Or maybe it just stayed there,” Eleanor replied quietly. “When I got it home, I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was just cheap brass until I took a sewing needle to the hinge and managed to pop the cover loose. When I saw her looking up at me from inside that little gold shell, I didn’t know who she was, but I knew she wasn’t the kind of person you throw into a cigar box with rusted fishhooks.”
She looked up from the locket and met my eyes, her gaze so steady and unblinking that I had to force myself not to look away toward the pharmacy sign. “I lost my own daughter, Beth, in 1988,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake, though it dropped an octave into that flat, grey register that only women who have buried their children ever truly learn to use. “She was twenty-two years old, same age as your mother when this picture was taken, more or less. Car accident on an icy bridge outside Lexington when the state forgot to salt the overpass. When you lose someone that young, Clara, the world doesn’t end with a big bang or a dramatic storm. It just gets very quiet and very large, like you’ve been dropped into an empty warehouse with twenty doors and none of them lead outside. You start looking for things to hold onto so you don’t float away. For thirty-four years, this little gold oval has been my anchor.”
“You wore it,” I said, my voice barely audible over the hum of the pharmacy refrigerator. “Every day.”
“Every single day,” she said, her thumb tracing the worn edge of the gold scrollwork where the metal had thinned almost to paper-thinness near the loop. “When my husband left me two years after the funeral because he couldn’t stand the sight of the bedroom door remaining closed, I put this chain around my neck and I didn’t take it off when I worked the double shifts at the laundry, and I didn’t take it off when I had my cancer surgeries fifteen years later. When the room would start spinning and I felt like I was losing my mind from the silence, I would reach inside my blouse, find this little piece of metal, and press it against my skin until it warmed up to my body temperature. I used to talk to her while I was doing the dishes. I called her Jane because I didn’t know her real name, and I told her about the garden I was trying to grow in the back alley and how much I missed my girl.”
She reached down, her dry fingers delicately turning the locket over so the smooth, unengraved back faced the light, showing the tiny scratches and dents where it had lived inside pockets and purses and jewelry boxes for more than half a century. “I tried to find you,” Eleanor continued, her tone matter-of-fact, without a trace of self-pity or melodrama. “About ten years ago, when my granddaughter showed me how to use the computer down at the public library, I spent three weeks scanning this photograph and uploading it to every historical board and lost-and-found genealogy page I could find between here and Indianapolis. I typed in *Easter 1967, young woman, brown hair, oval gold locket*. Nothing ever came up. I figured whoever she was, she was gone too, or her family had scattered to the wind the way people do when the mills close down and the young ones move out to Denver or Chicago for the assembly lines.”
“And then you walked into Kroger,” I said, a strange, half-hysterical bubble of air rising in my chest that felt almost like a laugh, though my eyes were stinging with hot, sudden tears.
“And then I walked into Kroger to buy some butter for my toast,” Eleanor corrected with a dry, papery chuckle. “I was standing by the apples, thinking about whether I wanted to bother making a pot of tea or just go straight to bed with a book, and you reached out to check the price on the lemons. You tilted your chin up just an inch to catch the light from the clerestory window above the bakery. It wasn’t just the jawline, Clara. It was the way your right shoulder drops a fraction of an inch lower than your left when you’re concentrating on something small. I dropped my basket right there on the linoleum. The eggs didn’t even break, which felt like a small miracle.”
She lifted the locket off her knee, the thin snake chain coiling through her fingers like a silver thread, and leaned forward until her forehead was only a few inches from mine. “I’m eighty-four years old,” she whispered, her breath smelling faintly of peppermint and old paper. “My house is too big, my knees are shot, and my doctor tells me I shouldn’t be driving out to the highway after dark anymore. I’ve carried your mother for thirty-four years through some very dark winters, and she was a good friend to me when I didn’t have anyone else left who understood what it means to be hollowed out. But she doesn’t belong to me. She was just staying with me until you were ready to have her back.”
She took my right hand, turned my palm upward, and laid the cold, heavy chain right across my lifeline, folding my fingers over the metal until my knuckles touched. “Take her home,” she said.
I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. I just sat there on that hard green vinyl bench with my fingers curled tight around the locket, feeling the small, hard shape of the oval press into the meat of my palm while the grocery store went about its business around us. A young stock boy in a stained red apron rolled a tall metal cart loaded with cases of Dr. Pepper past our feet, the aluminum cans clinking together like distant bells, and neither of us moved an inch. For nearly an hour, we sat shoulder to shoulder in the fluorescent glare, two old women who had lived entire separate lives connected only by four square inches of cheap celluloid and a dead girl’s smile, talking about things that didn’t matter and things that mattered more than anything else in the world. She told me about her daughter Beth’s red hair and the way she used to leave her muddy galooms right in the middle of the back hallway, and I told her about the smell of my mother’s lavender soap and how my father never quite learned how to fry an egg after she was gone.
We didn’t cry anymore after those first few minutes. We just spoke in that low, steady murmur of people who have survived the worst parts of their lives and are simply comparing notes on the weather down in the valley.
When Eleanor finally stood up, using her canvas bag as leverage against the arm of the bench and leaning hard on a wooden cane she had propped against the vending machine, she looked down at me with a face that looked lighter somehow, as if she had finally unloaded a heavy suitcase she’d been carrying across three states. “I won’t be needing the necklace anymore,” she said, smoothing down the front of her crooked blue cardigan with a hand that had stopped trembling. “My chest feels like I can take a full breath for the first time since the winter of ninety-eight.”
“Will you let me come see you?” I asked, standing up beside her and smoothing the front of my jacket. “I can bring some of those lemon cookies you like from the bakery down on Market Street.”
“I live just three blocks from here,” Eleanor said, giving me a small, conspiratorial wink that made her look forty years younger for a single, fleeting second. “Maple Street. The white house with the red door and the porch swing that needs a coat of paint. You knock around ten in the morning on Thursday. I’ll have the kettle on.”
I watched her walk toward the sliding glass doors of the entrance, her small, measured steps carrying her out into the bright afternoon sunlight until the automatic doors closed behind her with a soft pneumatic hiss and she was gone. I didn’t get back in my car right away. I stayed in the parking lot for twenty minutes, sitting behind the wheel of my old Buick with the engine idling and the radio playing some tinny old tune from the seventies that I couldn’t quite place, turning the little gold oval over and over in my fingers until the metal had warmed up to the temperature of my skin. When I finally drove home to the small, square house on the edge of town where I lived alone with two orange cats and a pile of unread library books, I didn’t put the chain in my jewelry box or lay it on the dresser beside my watch. I walked straight down the hallway to the bathroom, stood before the cracked mirror above the sink where the silvering was beginning to flake away around the edges like old ice, and fastened the tiny, stubborn clasp around my neck.
The gold rested right in the hollow of my throat, heavier than I expected, cool against my skin at first before slowly taking on the steady heat of my pulse. I unlatched the cover with the tip of my fingernail and looked down into the tiny oval frame for the first time in more than half a century. My mother looked back at me out of 1967, her head tilted just an inch to the left, her secret smile untouched by the decades of rain and rust and empty Saturday afternoons at the Third Street depot. I closed the lid with a soft, clean click that sounded very loud in the small, quiet room, laid my palm flat over the metal, and stood there in the grey afternoon light waiting for something to change, wondering if fifty-six years was enough time to finally forgive the world for taking her away before I even knew how to ask her to stay.
