Fifty-six years is a long time to carry the shape of a dead person in your pocket without ever being able to touch them. I was sixteen years old when my mother, Eleanor, died of a chest infection that just settled into her lungs and refused to leave, and for the longest time, the only proof I had that she had ever walked around our house in Dayton was that little gold locket.
It had a tiny hinge that always stuck if you pulled it too hard, and inside was the photograph my uncle took of her in the backyard during Easter, right before she got too weak to stand by the porch railing. I lost it on a Tuesday in November of 1968, somewhere between the third-period bell at school and the rainy bench at the RTA bus stop on Salem Avenue, and I spent every Saturday for two years checking the lost and found drawer behind the glass partition at the downtown transit garage like an absolute fool who didn’t know when to quit. The man behind the counter, Mr. Henderson with his grey crewcut and his smell of stale Lucky Strikes, always shook his head before I even finished walking up to the counter. He didn’t even have to look anymore. He just gave that little downward jerk of his chin that meant nothing had come in, and I would walk back out into the sleet with my hands jammed deep into my coat pockets, feeling like I had let her die all over again.
Life doesn’t stop just because you lose the only thing tethering you to the person who made you, though back then I thought it should have. You grow up, you move into a little ranch house off Ridge Avenue, you marry a man who smells like sawdust and motor oil, and you raise two boys who grow up so fast you barely notice the calendar pages tearing off the wall until you look in the mirror one morning and realize you have your mother’s exact bags under your eyes. My husband, Curtis, passed away three winters ago in the guest room we turned into a ground-floor bedroom after his knees went out, and after that, the house got very quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet where you start talking to the parakeet and noticing every little creak in the floor joists. I didn’t go out much anymore except for groceries on Tuesday mornings when the aisles were mostly empty and I could take my time pushing the red metal cart without some teenager in running shoes bumping into my ankles.
The Kroger on North Main is big and bright and smells faintly of bleach and roasting chickens, and I usually just stuck to the perimeter, getting my milk, my head of iceberg lettuce, and three or four baking potatoes in a plastic produce bag. I was standing right there by the misting sprayers where the green peppers sit, trying to decide if the yellow onions looked firm enough to bother with, when a woman with short dark hair and a heavy green wool coat walked past me and then stopped dead in her tracks.
She didn’t say excuse me or reach for a pepper. She just stood there three feet from the cabbage display, staring at my face with this strange, wide-eyed look that made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up. I thought maybe I had dropped something out of my purse or my slip was showing, which is always a terrifying thought when you are seventy-two and your hip is acting up, so I touched my cardigan and looked down at my sensible black loafers to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be.
But she wasn’t looking at my shoes. She was looking right at my cheekbones, right at the way my left eye droops just a fraction when I get tired. She had a canvas tote bag slung over her shoulder and her knuckles were white where she was holding the handle, like she had just run a mile through the snow. I cleared my throat and asked if I was standing in her way, because sometimes people get terribly impatient around the produce scale, but she just shook her head and took half a step closer with her breath catching in her throat.
“I am so sorry,” she said, and her voice shook in a way that made me think someone had just died. “I know this sounds completely crazy, and you are going to think I am out of my mind, but please don’t move.”
I didn’t move because my feet felt like they were glued straight through the linoleum to the concrete underneath, which is about how I usually react when a stranger starts talking to me in a supermarket. She reached up with a hand that was trembling so hard her silver rings clicked together, and she grabbed the little chain around her own neck. It was a fine, worn gold chain, the kind they don’t make anymore because everything now is hollow and cheap, and she lifted a small, oval gold locket right out from the collar of her sweater. She didn’t say another word for three full seconds while the overhead refrigerator hummed that low, dull note that sounds like a refrigerator in an empty house at two in the morning. Then she used her thumbnail to pop the tiny side catch, and the little gold doors swung open on their stiff, familiar hinge.
“I found it at an estate auction in Troy back in nineteen ninety,” she said, and her eyes were shining with tears that she wasn’t even trying to wipe away. “My mother wore it every single day until she passed away three years ago. And ever since then, I’ve worn it. But I always knew the face inside wasn’t my family. I just… I kept it safe.”
She held it out toward me on the flat of her palm, and the light from the fluorescent tubes overhead caught the tiny scratch right across the back where my brother Bobby had tried to carve my initials with a dull pocketknife back in sixty-seven. There was no mistaking that scratch. I could have closed my eyes and traced it with my thumb in total darkness and known it was the same piece of metal I dropped into the gray slush outside the RTA station fifty-six years ago. Inside the tiny frame, looking no older than nineteen with her hair pulled back in a simple Gibson tuck, was my mother, Eleanor, staring out at the world with that exact same slightly crooked smile she gave me the morning she made flapjacks and told me she was going to be fine. My chest got tight, the way it does when you try to lift something way too heavy for your arms, and I just stood there with my grocery basket digging into my hip because my brain kind of stopped working for a second.
“Her name was Eleanor,” I whispered, and I didn’t even care that my voice sounded like dry leaves scraping across a sidewalk.
The woman let out a long, shaky breath that sounded like relief, and she dropped the chain right into my trembling palm without letting go of the other end for a second, like she was handing over something sacred that didn’t quite belong to her anymore. “My name is Clara,” she said softly, her thumb brushing the edge of the gold oval. “My mother’s name was Martha. She bought it at a church bazaar over in Huber Heights thirty-four years ago because she said the girl in the picture looked like she needed somebody to remember her. She lost her own little sister when she was young, and she used to carry this around in her apron pocket like a talisman or something. She told me before she died that whoever lost it must have cried their eyes out.”
We stood there right beside the celery crates while shoppers with red carts squeezed past us, saying excuse me and reaching for bags of carrots without having the slightest idea that the world had just stopped turning on its axis for two old women in a Dayton supermarket. I didn’t cry right away, because when you get to be seventy-two, your grief has kind of settled down into old, smooth stones at the bottom of a creek, and it takes a lot of water to stir them back up to the surface. But my fingers remembered the weight of it. They remembered the way the latch always caught just a little bit on the right side if you didn’t push it straight. I closed the locket and listened to that tiny, familiar click, and for a second I could smell the woodsmoke from our old coal furnace on Michigan Avenue and hear my mother singing while she folded the Monday laundry on the kitchen table.
“You should come with me,” I heard myself saying, and I didn’t even wait to see if she had somewhere else to be. “There’s a diner two blocks down that still makes decent coffee, and I think you need to tell me how your mother found this thing.”
Clara didn’t hesitate for even a second. She just nodded, picked up her canvas tote bag from the floor where she had dropped it by the cucumbers, and followed me out past the cash registers into the cold November air without looking back once.
The Diner Deluxe hasn’t changed its red vinyl booths since Curtis and I used to come here after church back in the seventies, and the smell of grease and stale coffee is like a second home to anyone who’s lived in this part of town long enough to remember when the auto plants were running three shifts around the clock. We sat in the back booth near the frosted window where the steam from the dishwasher makes little runnels down the glass, and the waitress, a girl named Brenda with a name tag pinned crookedly to her apron, dropped two heavy white mugs on the formica without looking at our faces. Clara didn’t touch her coffee right away. She just laid the locket down on the table between us, right next to the metal sugar dispenser and the little plastic holder full of yellow Sweet’N Low packets, and we both just stared at it like it was some kind of strange animal that had wandered in out of the snow.
“My mother wasn’t a collector,” Clara said, wrapping both hands around her warm mug to keep them from shaking. “She was a nurse over at Good Samaritan for thirty-two years, and after my dad passed away in eighty-eight, she got real quiet. She started going to garage sales and church basements on Saturday mornings just to have somewhere to walk where people weren’t asking her for things. She found this in a little cardboard box full of old buttons and costume jewelry behind a lady’s garage on North Dixie Drive. The lady wanted fifty cents for it, but Martha gave her five dollars because she said the metal still had a heartbeat.”
I looked at the locket, then up at Clara’s eyes, and I could see her mother in her forehead, that same broad, square line that comes from generations of women who worked with their hands and didn’t complain about the cold winters in the Miami Valley. “She kept it safe,” I said. “That’s more than I managed to do. I lost it because I was running for the five-fifteen bus and my strap snapped on the corner of Salem and Grand. I heard it hit the concrete, but by the time I turned around, the bus doors were already hissing shut and the driver was pulling away into traffic. I chased that bus two blocks down the hill before I realized I was just making a fool of myself in front of the neighbors.”
“Mom always said things find the people who need them most,” Clara whispered, looking down at the tabletop. “She didn’t have many people left by the time I was born. I was an adoption, late in her life, and when she looked at this picture, she used to tell me that whoever lost it must have been a good girl because her mother had kind eyes. She kept it in her jewelry box upstairs in her cedar chest, right next to her baptismal certificate and the dried corsage from her high school prom. She took it out every year on her birthday and polished it with an old flannel cloth.”
We sat there for a long time while the noon rush came and went, the sound of silverware clattering against ceramic plates filling the space between us until the room quieted down again around one o’clock. Brenda came back and poured more coffee without asking, and I noticed she had the same little ink stain on her right thumb that my youngest boy, Tim, used to get when he worked the printing press down on Monument Avenue. I picked up the locket and held it in my palm, feeling the cool gold warm up against my skin until it felt like it had never been away at all. Fifty-six years is longer than most marriages last, longer than most houses stay standing in these old neighborhoods where the city comes in with yellow bulldozers and turns everything into a parking lot for the hospital expansion. But this little piece of brass and plated gold had stayed in a cedar box on North Dixie Drive while the world changed around it, waiting for two strangers to bump into each other over the green peppers at Kroger.
“You should keep it,” I said, sliding the gold chain across the formica toward her. “Your mother took care of it when I couldn’t. She loved it for thirty years, Clara. That makes it hers just as much as it was mine.”
Clara looked down at the locket, and her lower lip quivered just a tiny bit before she shook her head and pushed it right back across the table toward my fingers. “No,” she said, and her voice was very firm now, the way a nurse’s voice gets when she’s telling a doctor he’s wrong about a chart. “Martha loved the ghost inside it. She didn’t know the girl. But you’re the girl. You’re the one whose mother looked down at her in the backyard that Easter morning. My mother would have wanted it back where it started. She always said nothing is ever truly lost until the people who remember it are gone, and you’re still right here.”
I didn’t argue with her after that because I knew she was right, and besides, my throat felt too thick to get the words out properly without sounding like an old fool. Instead, I reached into my purse, pulled out my leather card case, and took out the recent school portrait of my granddaughter Maya, who has those exact same dark, stubborn eyes and the little freckle right under her left nostril that came down from Eleanor through me and straight on through to the next generation. I slid the small photograph across the table and told Clara that if she was going to keep a piece of our family history, she at least needed to know what the girl in the locket grew up to look like, even if the hair was white now instead of brown.
Clara took the little photograph and held it up to the diner light, tracing the edge of Maya’s smile with her thumb just like her mother must have done with the locket every year on her birthday. “She looks like you,” she said softly. “She looks like both of you.”
We paid our bill, Clara tried to leave a ten-dollar tip for two cups of coffee, which I had to take half back because we aren’t made of money around here, and then we walked out together into the gray November afternoon. The wind was picking up off the river, carrying that sharp, damp smell of dead leaves and old coal dust that always means snow is coming down from Lake Erie before the weekend is out. We didn’t drive away right away. We stood out by the curb in front of the diner for a few minutes, watching the traffic crawl past on North Main, two women who had lived entire lives on opposite sides of the same county without ever knowing the other one existed until a Tuesday morning in the produce aisle.
“Are you going to be all right getting home?” she asked, pulling her green coat tight around her neck against the wind.
“I live right over on Ridge,” I told her, patting the pocket of my cardigan where the locket was resting against my ribs, heavy and warm and real for the first time in more than half a century. “It’s just a ten-minute walk if my hip holds out, and honestly, the walk will do me good.”
“Call me next week,” she said, and she reached out and squeezed my hand with fingers that were strong and steady. “We’ll have lunch again. Maybe at the diner, or maybe at my place. I’ve got a whole box of my mother’s old photographs from when she was nursing in the fifties, and I bet there are some from the street fairs downtown where you might have crossed paths twenty times without knowing it.”
I told her I would, and I meant it, because when you get to be seventy-two years old, you don’t turn down people who remember the same streets you do. She got into her little blue station wagon and waved once through the frosted windshield before she pulled out into the traffic and headed toward the interstate. I watched her tail-lights disappear around the corner by the dry cleaner’s, and then I turned and started walking the long way home, past the old RTA bus stop where the green bench had been replaced ten years ago with a modern steel shelter that didn’t rattle when the wind blew. I kept my hand right there in my pocket, holding onto the gold oval while the afternoon shadows stretched out long and gray across the pavement, and for the first time since Curtis died, the house on Ridge Avenue didn’t feel quite so empty after all.
