My husband told me to wait by the bar tent at his company’s anniversary party and tell anyone who asked that I was hired help, because my forty-dollar dress made him look cheap. “You could pass for a bartender,” he said. Then the chairman’s wife saw the silver half-moon on my necklace and caught her husband by the sleeve.
Eleven years Chase had given that company, and he’d decided tonight was the night it paid him back.
He looked me over twice before we were even out of the car.
Not the way a man looks at his wife.
The way you check a rental for dents.
I had on a brick-red knit dress I’d bought on clearance for forty dollars, back when we were still renting. That morning I’d sewn up a seam under the left arm, small stitches, the thread a shade off.
I thought it looked fine.
Chase didn’t.
He tossed his keys to the kid parking cars, tugged at his cuffs, and stood there on the gravel staring at my hem.
“You couldn’t find anything else?”
“It’s a nice dress, Chase.”
“Nice isn’t the bar tonight.”
People were stepping out of cars I’d only seen in commercials, and he dropped his voice so none of them would catch it.
“The whole board came. Two state senators. And Mr. Rausch is bringing his wife.”
“I know. It’s why I’m here. For you.”
He actually laughed.
“For me.”
“Yes.”
He looked at the stitched seam like it had insulted him personally.
“Honestly? You could pass for one of the bartenders.”
I didn’t answer him.
There was a time a line like that would have knocked the air out of me.
By then it was just ONE MORE for the pile.
When we met, I was running the reading program at a public library branch, and Chase had come to a donor night on his firm’s behalf. He stood by the paperback cart for two hours going on about how rare it felt to find a woman who gave zero thought to what a man drove.
Being plain, according to him, was the best thing about me.
Somewhere after the wedding, plain turned into a problem.
Keep it short with the clients.
Nobody needs to hear about the duplex.
Let me do the introducing, babe.
And eventually he quit dressing it up as advice at all.
On the gravel that night, he leaned in close.
“When we get out there, stay over by the bar tent.”
“What?”
“Or the coat rack. Somewhere out of the way.”
“Chase.”
“And if somebody asks, you’re NOT my wife.”
I waited for him to grin.
He didn’t.
“Then what am I?”
“Say you’re with the caterer.”
It sank in slowly, like cold water through a shoe.
My hand went up to the little pendant without me telling it to.
It was the only thing I owned that came from before.
Old silver, worn soft at the edges, cut like a crescent moon split down the middle, with a little notch where it should have met something else.
Betty Boone kept it in a coffee can for me until the year I started asking real questions.
Betty took me in when I was about two.
She cut hair out of her kitchen in a duplex with a broken screen door, she worked until her wrists ached, and not once in my life did she make me feel like an extra mouth.
Near the end, from the hospital bed we’d set up by her window, she gave me the rest.
“A fire took the house you were in,” she said. “Nobody ever came asking for you.”
She put two fingers on the pale mark on my shoulder.
“That mark and the chain around your neck. That’s all, honey.”
For twenty-eight years those two things were everything I knew about where I started.
Out on the terrace, Chase became somebody else.
Taller somehow.
Louder.
He shook hands, he touched elbows, he laughed at things that weren’t funny. You’d never guess that twenty minutes earlier, in a gravel lot, he’d asked me to pass myself off as staff.
I went and stood by the bar tent.
Right where he’d put me.
A woman in pearls handed me her empty glass on her way past.
I held it.
Across the lawn, Chase saw, and looked away.
Then the whole lawn shifted.
People stopped halfway through sentences.
Heads turned toward the stone steps.
Alejandro Rausch had come down from the house.
He was seventy-one, and he’d built the freight company Chase worked for out of one truck and a rented lot. Chase talked about him at breakfast. He talked about him in his sleep.
One good word from Mr. Rausch could make a career.
One bad one could end it by Monday.
His wife walked on his arm. Setsuko. Small, silver-haired, in a dark gray dress, and the only person on that lawn who didn’t seem to be performing.
Chase practically ditched the man he’d been talking to.
“Mr. Rausch.”
He crossed the grass so fast he sloshed his drink.
Mr. Rausch took the handshake.
“Chase.”
“Sir, thank you for having us out here.”
“My wife tells me yours came tonight. She wanted to meet her.”
Chase’s face moved.
Barely.
I caught it from across the lawn.
“She’s here somewhere, sir.”
Setsuko smiled. “Point her out.”
Chase took too long to answer.
Then he found me by the tent, still holding a stranger’s glass.
“She’s not really a party person.”
Mr. Rausch looked where Chase was looking.
Chase gave me two quick flicks of his fingers, the way you’d call a waiter.
“Fernanda.”
I set the glass down and walked over.
The grass felt about a mile long.
When I got there, Chase’s eyes said behave.
“Mr. and Mrs. Rausch, this is Fernanda.”
And while I was still drawing breath he told them, “She’s with the caterer tonight.”
I looked at my husband.
So did Mr. Rausch.
I put out my hand, because what else do you do.
“I’m glad to meet both of you.”
Nobody took it.
Setsuko was staring at the hollow of my throat.
Her free hand closed on her husband’s sleeve, hard enough that the fabric bunched.
Mr. Rausch followed her eyes and stopped moving.
“Ask her,” Setsuko said. “Ask her how long she’s had it.”
He stepped toward me.
“Where did that come from?”
I touched it.
“This?”
Chase laughed, too high.
“It’s junk, sir. Some flea market thing she won’t take off.”
Mr. Rausch didn’t even glance at him.
“How long has it been yours?”
“My whole life. Even my earliest memory has it.”
Setsuko’s mouth opened and nothing came out.
She spoke to her husband in Japanese, very low, and his hand covered hers on his sleeve.
That was when Chase finally felt the temperature drop.
He got hold of my elbow.
“Okay, we’re done here. Head back to the tent.”
Mr. Rausch’s eyes went straight to Chase’s fingers on my arm.
Chase put on his best smile.
“She doesn’t do well at these things. I keep TELLING her that thing looks like it came out of a gumball machine.”
His fingers dug in.
“Go stand by the tent before you humiliate me.”
Alejandro Rausch’s voice carried over the whole lawn.
“LET GO OF HER ARM. RIGHT NOW.”
Chase let go like my sleeve had burned him.
Every conversation within forty feet died.
Mr. Rausch moved in between us, his eyes still on the little silver half-moon against my throat.
Behind him, Setsuko was crying without a sound.
With her other hand, she was pulling a thin silver chain up out of the collar of her own dress.
Forty feet
The chain came up out of her collar one link at a time, and on the end of it hung the other half of my moon.
Same old silver. Same soft edges. Same little notch, cut on the other side, so it faced mine.
Setsuko held it out on her palm, toward my throat, and didn’t touch me.
I unhooked my clasp. My fingers were useless at it, the way they’re useless at earrings in a moving car, and behind me Chase made a small noise, like I was about to drop something he’d paid for.
I laid my half in her hand next to hers.
They went together with a click. A small one. Like a purse shutting.
A whole moon, sitting in the palm of a woman I’d known for about ninety seconds.
Somebody over by the tent said, “Oh my God,” and somebody else told her to hush.
Setsuko closed her fingers over both pieces. Her face was wet and perfectly still at the same time, which I didn’t know a face could manage.
Mr. Rausch looked at her fist. Then at the guests. Then at me. Then at the guests again, like a man counting the exits in a theater.
“Not here,” he said.
“Alejandro.”
“Not here, Setsuko.” Lower now, just for her. “People have come to us before. Women with stories.”
I was standing right there with my neck bare and my seam showing. I heard every word.
Women with stories.
I wanted to tell him I didn’t have a story. I had a coffee can.
Chase’s hand landed on the small of my back. Warm. Friendly. The hand of a man who’d just been told to let go of my arm and had found a different part of me to hold on to.
“Sir,” he said, “whatever you need. My wife and I can come inside.”
My wife.
An hour ago I was with the caterer.
The coffee can
We followed them up the stone steps, Chase half a pace ahead of me, as if he was the one who’d been asked.
Let me tell you about the coffee can, because it matters.
Folgers. The big red one, with a plastic lid gone cloudy from twenty-eight years of being pried off. Betty kept my pendant in it when I was little, wrapped in one of her hairnets so it wouldn’t rattle. After she died I kept it the same way. I wore the moon all day, and at night it went in the can, in the hairnet, on the dresser. Some habits come with the furniture.
Under the hairnet were the printouts.
The winter I was twenty-two, I spent every lunch hour at the microfilm reader in the back of my branch. I printed every house fire in three counties from the year I was two. Forty-one of them.
I kept the ones where a little girl came out alive and nobody claimed her. There were three, and none of them were me.
I kept a few of the others too. The ones where a child didn’t come out. Throwing those away felt like stepping on a grave, so they went in the can face down, and I never read them twice.
Six years ago, on our fourth date, Chase sat on my apartment floor with that can between his knees. He went through the printouts one by one, frowning like a man doing his taxes, and then he kissed the top of my head and called me his little detective.
Then he touched my left shoulder through my T-shirt. Right on the mark.
“We’ll get you a cute sweater for the wedding pictures,” he said. “Cover that up.”
Fourth date. Wedding pictures. I laughed, because he laughed, and because a man talking about wedding pictures on the fourth date felt like winning something.
He did buy the sweater. Cream, pearl buttons. I’m wearing it in every photograph on our stairs.
Going up those stone steps, with my moon shut in a stranger’s fist and the mark under my sleeve, I thought about that sweater.
Nobody needs to hear about the duplex.
He’d been practicing on my shoulder for six years.
The photograph of one truck
The study had one picture on the wall. Not a painting. A black-and-white photo of a single box truck on a dirt lot, and a skinny young man leaning on the bumper with his arms folded like he was daring it to break down.
Mr. Rausch didn’t sit, so nobody sat.
Setsuko opened her hand over the desk blotter and set the two halves down side by side. She pushed them together with one finger. Then apart. Then together.
“Where was the fire?” Mr. Rausch said.
“I don’t know, sir. Betty said a fire took the house I was in. That’s all she ever had.”
“Who is Betty?”
“The woman who raised me. She cut hair in her kitchen.”
“Is she living?”
“It’ll be seven years in March.”
He nodded like that was a number he could respect.
Chase stepped in. Of course he did.
“She was in foster care, sir. Very humble.” He gave it a beat. “A duplex.”
Last month the duplex was a secret. Tonight he was serving it on a silver tray.
“It’s a lot for her,” he said. “She gets emotional. I’m usually the one who keeps her…”
“Alejandro,” Setsuko said. “Ask her if there’s a…”
“She’s exhausted,” Chase said, right over the top of her. “She’s had some wine, it’s been a big night, I think we should let her rest.”
I’d had no wine. I’d held a glass. There’s a difference, and it’s about four ounces.
Mr. Rausch lifted one hand an inch off the desk, and Chase stopped talking like somebody had pulled his plug.
Setsuko didn’t finish her question. She looked down at the halves instead, and her mouth stayed a little open, as if the rest of the sentence was still in there.
“I built that company by being slow,” Mr. Rausch said to me. “I’m going to be slow now. Come tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Here.”
“We’ll be here, sir,” Chase said.
Mr. Rausch didn’t look at him. “I asked her.”
Setsuko picked up my half and held it out to me. When I took it, she didn’t let go right away. Her thumb stayed on the notch a second longer than needed.
“Wear it home,” she said.
At the door, Mr. Rausch put a hand on the frame so Chase had to stop.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “she walks in on her own.”
Eleven-forty, Route 9
Chase made it four miles before he hit the steering wheel with both hands and laughed out loud.
“Do you understand what happened back there?”
“Yes.”
“No. Fern. Do you understand.” He was doing eighty. He never did eighty. “They announce regional on Monday. Monday. I was going to get it anyway, probably, but if you’re… whatever you are to them, babe, I’m not regional. I’m family.”
I had the moon in my fist in my lap. The edges had gone warm.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “you let me do the talking.”
“He asked me.”
“He asked you to be polite. You know what you do when you’re nervous? You talk about Betty. You talk about haircuts. You tell people about the screen door.” He pointed at me without looking. “No screen door tomorrow.”
I wanted to open the car door at eighty miles an hour and see which one of us it embarrassed more.
“You told that man I was with the caterer,” I said.
“That was a joke.”
“You told me to say it.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
He didn’t answer that one. He turned the radio on, then off again.
“I’m going alone tomorrow,” I said. “And when I get home, I’m packing.”
He laughed. Then he looked over, and I wasn’t laughing, and he stopped.
For a mile he didn’t say anything. Then he got very calm, which with Chase is worse than the yelling. Calm is when he’s doing math.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“I do.”
“You walk into that house without me, you’ll embarrass yourself. You heard him. They’ve had women before.” He put his blinker on for our exit, careful, a good citizen. “You’ll just be one more.”
At home I went straight to the bedroom. I wrapped the moon in Betty’s hairnet and put it in the can and pressed the cloudy lid down until it popped.
Chase stood in the doorway with his tie hanging loose, looking at the can.
“Sleep on it,” he said.
Then he turned out the light.
Sunday, 8:10
The lid was on the floor.
That was the first thing, before I even sat up. A red plastic circle lying face down on the carpet by the dresser like a dropped coaster.
The hairnet was in the can. Empty.
The printouts were gone. All forty-one. Eight years of lunch hours, and the can was just a can.
Chase’s side of the bed was cold. I went to the window in my T-shirt, and there was a dry rectangle on the driveway where his car had been, the kind you only get when it’s been gone a while.
My phone had one text, from 6:52.
Handling it. Stay home. Don’t make this worse.
I called him. It went straight to his voicemail, which says, “You’ve reached Chase, let’s make something happen.” I’ve hated that message for four years. That morning I wanted to reach through the phone and let something happen to him.
I didn’t. I got dressed.
Jeans. Betty’s brown cardigan, the one with the elbows gone thin, because it was the only thing in the closet that felt like somebody was on my side.
The cab was thirty-eight dollars. That’s almost a dress.
The driver talked about his sister’s knee replacement the whole way out to the lake, and I said “Oh no” in the right places and kept one hand on my bare throat like it might fall off. Without the moon my neck felt like a room somebody had moved out of.
The gate at the bottom of the Rausch drive stood open. I told the driver not to wait, because I couldn’t afford the meter and because I didn’t plan on leaving.
I walked up the gravel.
Chase’s car was parked at the foot of the stone steps, exactly where the kid had put it the night before.
I laid my hand on the hood.
Stone cold.
The front door
I rang the bell, and Mr. Rausch opened the door himself.
He had on a gray cardigan, a better one than mine, and he was holding a sheet of paper. I knew the paper before I knew anything else. I’d printed it. The corner still had my pencil check from eight years ago, the way I marked the ones I’d read.
Behind him, halfway down the hall, stood Chase. He had a coffee cup in one hand and the saucer in the other, the way he holds a putter when he wants to look like he plays more than he does.
“Elm Street Fire,” Mr. Rausch said. He didn’t have to look at it. “Nanny, Toddler Feared Dead.”
There was a photo. Grainy, gray, a young woman behind a police line with her hand over her mouth.
Setsuko. Twenty-eight years younger.
I had kept that page face down in a coffee can for eight years and never turned it over twice.
“Is this yours?” Mr. Rausch said.
There’s a moment where you could lie. I didn’t even see it go by.
“Yes.”
“Where did you keep it?”
“In my coffee can.”
“For how long?”
“Eight years.”
Something closed in his face. Like a store at nine o’clock.
Chase came forward with his coffee.
“Sir, I told you she’d be honest about it. That’s the sad part. She believes it.” He shook his head at me, sorry, so sorry. “She’s had your family in that can since before she ever met me. When she found out who I worked for… I’m not saying she planned it. I’m saying when the invitation came, she wanted to go so bad. You heard her last night. ‘For you.’ She said that for weeks.”
I’d said it once. On the gravel. To him.
“Why do you think I stood her by the tent?” Chase said. “I didn’t want her near your wife, sir. I saw how she looked at your Christmas card. She kept it on our fridge for three years.”
“You put that card on the fridge,” I said.
Chase turned to Mr. Rausch with his palm up. See?
“Four women,” Mr. Rausch said to me. Quietly. “In twenty-eight years. One of them had a necklace too, made by a jeweler. After her, my wife didn’t get dressed for a year.”
“Let me talk to her.”
“No.”
“Last night she was going to ask me something, and he…”
“She’s going to cry now, sir,” Chase said. “She does this.”
I did not cry. I thought about taking that saucer out of his hand and finding out how far it would go across a marble floor. I’ll be honest, I had a number in mind.
“Where is my necklace?”
“Your husband brought it,” Mr. Rausch said. “I told him I didn’t want it in my house.”
Chase patted his shirt pocket, over his heart, twice.
“It’s safe, babe. I’ve got it.”
Mr. Rausch looked at me for a long moment. He looked tired, and old, like a man who had been kind to four women and was done.
“Go home, Fernanda.”
Then he turned his head. “Chase. Stay. We’ll talk about Monday.”
Chase smiled at me over the coffee cup. Small. Just for me. The same smile he used to send me across rooms when I’d said something cute.
The door shut.
On the other side of it, Chase laughed at something.
The bar tent, coming down
I stood on the gravel for a while.
The cab was gone. His car was right there. If I’d had the keys I’d have driven it into the lake and walked home along the shore, humming.
Instead I walked around the side of the house.
I don’t know what I was going for. Maybe just to stand where it happened. The lawn was mostly put away. The coat rack was still out on the grass with one wire hanger on it, swinging. Two young guys in work gloves were taking down the bar tent, folding the white canvas in big slow squares, and neither of them looked at me. I was a woman in an old cardigan crossing a lawn. I could pass for staff.
Setsuko was sitting on the bottom step of the terrace.
Slacks, a long gray sweater, her hair not done. In her lap she had her half of the moon, the chain wrapped twice around her fingers.
She saw me and didn’t seem surprised.
“He told me to stay upstairs,” she said. “I came down the back way. I’ve been coming down the back way for twenty-eight years.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I sat down two steps above her, which was stupid, and then moved down to her step, which was better.
“He has your necklace,” she said. “In his pocket. I saw from the window. He kept touching it.”
“I know.”
“Last night I tried to ask you something. Your husband talked.”
“He does that.”
“Can I ask you now?”
“Yes.”
She looked up at the windows of her own house, like a girl checking for her mother. Then she looked at me.
“Your left shoulder,” she said.
I didn’t ask what she meant. I pulled Betty’s cardigan off my left shoulder, and my T-shirt collar with it, right there in the cold, with two strangers folding a tent twenty feet away.
Setsuko stood up.
She put two fingers on the mark. Exactly where Betty used to put them. The same two fingers, the same spot, like the two of them had worked it out between them.
She said a word in Japanese. Then she said it again, and her voice went.
“When you were a baby,” she said, “I used to press it like a doorbell. You laughed every time.”
I didn’t move. If I moved I was going to come apart on that step.
“They told us there was nothing left to find,” she said. “I asked anyway. Every year. The fire department. The county. A man at a desk who called me ‘the mother’ like it was my job. Every year they said the same thing.”
“Betty told me nobody ever came asking for me.”
“I came.” She pressed the mark once, gently. “I was asking the wrong people.”
“How do you know it’s…”
“Nobody knows about this mark. Not the newspaper. Not the four women. Me, Alejandro, the doctor who delivered you. That’s all.” She pulled my collar back up over it, the way you’d tuck in a child. “That’s how I knew to ask.”
Then she took my hand in her small dry one and turned toward the terrace doors.
“Come,” she said. “He’s in there promising that boy Monday.”
The desk blotter
She opened the terrace doors without knocking, and we walked straight into the study with the one truck on the wall.
Mr. Rausch was behind his desk. Chase was in the leather chair across from him with his ankle on his knee and the saucer balanced on his shoe, telling a story with his free hand.
“…and I said to him, sir, regional’s not about the miles, it’s about the…”
He saw me and the saucer slid.
Mr. Rausch stood up fast for a man of seventy-one. “Setsuko. I asked you to stay upstairs.”
“Look at her shoulder,” Setsuko said. In English. So everybody got it.
So I pulled the cardigan down again. Second time that morning. I was getting good at it.
Mr. Rausch came around the desk slowly, one hand on the edge of it the whole way, the way you walk on a boat. He stopped in front of me and looked.
He didn’t touch it. He put his hand over his own mouth instead. Then he sat down on the corner of the desk like his legs had quit on him.
Chase was on his feet. Coffee on the rug. Nobody looked at the rug.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Sir. A birthmark. Lots of people have marks. She’s had eight years with that stuff, it could’ve been in one of those papers, she could have…”
“It was never in a paper,” Mr. Rausch said.
“She could have guessed.”
“The left side?” Setsuko said. “The shape?”
Chase opened his mouth and nothing was in it. Then something was.
“Then this is incredible.” He turned to me with both arms out. “Fern. Babe. This is incredible. I didn’t know. How could I know? I was protecting him, you heard him last night, four women, sir, you said it yourself, I was only trying to…”
“I said it,” Mr. Rausch said. “You used it.”
I held out my hand to Chase. Flat. Palm up.
“My necklace.”
“Of course. Of course.” He dug in his shirt pocket and came out with the moon and the chain knotted up together, and he stepped in close and lifted it toward my neck. He was going to fasten it on me. In front of them. Like a husband in a commercial.
I stepped back.
“In my hand,” I said.
He stood there holding it in the air between us. Then he put it in my hand. His fingers were wet from the coffee.
Mr. Rausch got up off the desk.
“Last night,” he said, “you told me my daughter was with the caterer.”
My daughter. He said it like he’d been holding it in his mouth for twenty-eight years and it still fit.
“This morning you told me she was a thief. You took that off her dresser while she was asleep, and you drove it to my house, and you sat in my chair and drank my coffee and asked me about Monday.”
“Sir, I…”
“Tell me it isn’t true.”
Chase looked at me. At Setsuko. At the truck on the wall, like it might help.
Then he broke, and it all came out at once, louder than anything I’d ever heard him say in our house.
“What was I supposed to do? She was leaving me. She said so in the car. She was going to walk in here and tell you about the tent and I’d be done. Eleven years. Done. Over a joke.” He pointed at me. “I gave her my name. I put her in a real house. She was a girl from a duplex holding some stranger’s empty glass…”
“You saw me holding it,” I said. “You looked away.”
That’s all I said. It was enough. He looked away again, right then, at the rug.
“Your keys,” Mr. Rausch said.
“Sir.”
“The car belongs to the company. Put the keys on my desk. And the card in your wallet.”
Chase put the keys on the blotter, on the same spot where the two halves had sat side by side the night before. Then the company card next to them. His hands knew how to do it. They’d been doing what Mr. Rausch said for eleven years.
“Before you go,” Mr. Rausch said, “tell her what you told me she was.”
“Sir, please.”
“Tell her.”
Chase said it to the rug. “I said you were a con.”
“To her face.”
He lifted his head. His eyes were red. I’ll give him that, he had real tears. They just weren’t for me.
“I said you were a con, Fern.”
“Fernanda,” I said.
Setsuko opened the study door and stood beside it, holding it for him like a hostess, which is the coldest thing I have ever seen a small woman do.
He walked out. We heard the front door, then his shoes on the gravel, crunching away down the long drive, past the car he didn’t have keys to anymore.
Betty’s row
When the gravel went quiet, Alejandro Rausch got down on one knee on his own wet rug.
It took him a while. One hand on the desk, one on my arm, the slow way old men go down when they haven’t done it since their wedding.
“I shut my door on you,” he said. “This morning. I shut my own door on you.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew how to ask. I didn’t ask.” He held on to my arm. “I’m asking now. Come back here. Tomorrow, and the day after.”
Setsuko came and stood behind him and put her hand on his head like he was the one who needed it.
I said yes. Then I sat down on the rug beside him, because it seemed rude to make a seventy-one-year-old man kneel by himself.
Here is what Chase lost, since he always liked an exact number.
The car stayed in the Rausch drive. Gray company sedan, thirty-four thousand miles, a dent in the back bumper he’d blamed on me.
The company card, Setsuko cut in half with the desk scissors. Two halves. She has a sense of humor nobody warned me about.
His cab home from the lake was forty-one dollars. He texted me a photo of the receipt and asked me to split it. I sent him forty-one cents and wrote for the bartender.
On Monday his badge stopped opening the gate at the freight yard at 6:58 in the morning. Regional was announced at nine. It wasn’t his name.
On Thursday he moved out with two suitcases and his golf bag. He stood in the front doorway with the bag on his shoulder and looked at me in Betty’s cardigan.
“None of this happens without me,” he said. “I’m the one who brought you to that party.”
“Your cab’s here,” I said.
Three Saturdays later, Alejandro drove us himself, in a pickup with a dented tailgate he says he earned. He parked on the gravel by the cemetery gate.
I wore the brick-red dress. I hadn’t decided to. My hands just took it out of the closet.
Setsuko got out of the truck, came around, and looked me over twice.
Not the way you check a rental for dents.
The way you count a baby’s fingers, and then count them again because you can.
She traced the seam under my left arm with one finger. “You sewed this.”
“The morning of the party.”
“Small stitches.”
“Betty taught me.”
“Then I owe her for that too,” she said, and took my arm.
We walked down the row, Alejandro a little behind us with flowers he’d picked out himself and was embarrassed about. My half of the moon was around my throat. Setsuko’s was around hers, outside her collar now, where anybody could see it.
At Betty’s stone, Setsuko bowed. A real one, from the waist.
I put my hand on top of the stone, warm from the sun, the way I used to rest my hand on Betty’s shoulder while she cut somebody’s hair.
“Betty,” I said, “this is my mother.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s ever been told to go stand by the tent.
For more family drama and long-buried secrets, read “My Mother Left the Front Desk a Note About Me” and “My Mother Covered My Phone Before Frances Could Read It”. And see what happens when one woman is left off Lakeisha’s wedding list – until the venue needs her expertise.
