Unbroken Threads

by Jennifer Klepper

Ouch. Jessica shifted her stance, successfully prompting Rosalie to release the hold she had on Jessica’s triceps. “Rosalie, I know it’s been a while, but you do recall that I worked at H&C in securities compliance? If your refugees are planning to take a company public or are closing a venture capital round, I’d be pretty qualified to help once I brushed up on things a bit.” She would need more than a bit of brushing up, but still. “Immigration, asylum, and all that weren’t my area.”

  Rosalie was undeterred, words pouring out again unapologetically. “That won’t be a problem at all. Most of our volunteers practice in areas completely unrelated to asylum. We have tax attorneys, divorce attorneys, patent attorneys, you name it.” She extended her arm Vanna White–style toward the assembled collection of lawyers, who were getting louder as the bartenders poured more free drinks. “You’ll be fine. And didn’t you write your Law Review article on due process in eminent domain cases?”

  Jessica had an inkling now of why Rosalie had invited her. “That’s not immigration.” She signaled for another cabernet. The event sponsor had sprung for a vintage Jessica would only buy if she was in need of fine liquid comfort.

  “No, my point is that you clearly haven’t limited your scope of knowledge to securities law. You’ll pick things up quickly. I know you do a lot of volunteer work, and this comes closer to your training. Listen, it’s a great way for attorneys to give back, and the people you help are wonderful. The mentor program is strong, and you’ll learn everything you need to know before you get your first solo case. We have some retired attorneys who take on cases, but most are practicing, and they have no problem working the IAP case in with their full-time jobs.”

  She’d spoken as though Jessica had already signed up, and of course Jessica would, because that was what she did. For the past ten years or so, askers had benefitted from Jessica’s need to say “yes” to every request for her to take on a volunteer position, even when she hadn’t wanted to.

  She wondered if that lack of desire might explain the shameful sense of relief that had washed over her when the Syrian had left the room that morning. Perhaps more shameful, and more likely the reason for the relief, though, was the gnawing discomfort in her gut when she’d discovered the identity of her client—a Muslim from Syria. Give us your huddled masses, yearning to be free—just not the ones who scare me.

  Jessica took the on-ramp to the highway, squinted at the city in her rearview mirror, and asked her phone to dial Rosalie so she could tender her resignation for a job that had never really started.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Back in Annapolis on her neighborhood’s tree-lined streets—streets free of notarios and barred windows—Jessica pushed the unwelcome inner dialogue out of her head. Having blocked off her day for meeting her new client and doing research for the case, she now had the day free. She didn’t want to spend it arguing with herself about her capabilities and her possible prejudices, especially now that she had left a message on Rosalie’s voice mail that she was done at IAP. “It’s just not a good fit,” she’d said.

  A mature sugar maple, on the verge of exploding into fall colors, marked the Donnellys’ century-old bungalow, a welcome view in any season when turning from Poplar Avenue onto Sycamore Street. Today, however, the tree cast a shadow on a yellow moving truck parked at the curb.

  Jessica pulled into the driveway and checked her watch, though it wasn’t going to tell her it was tomorrow, which was when the moving truck was supposed to arrive from Iowa with the remnants of her grandmother’s estate. A man wearing a blue uniform was standing in front of the Donnellys’ historic association-approved Revere red door, further confirming the truck was there for her. She slumped against the steering wheel then slowly peeled herself out of her car.

  The man was wide in a way that wasn’t fat. He was sturdy, as if he was built for balancing heavy furniture with his low center of gravity. He wasted no time after Jessica approached him. “Ma’am, we were just about to leave. Been waiting here for some time.” He didn’t mask the irritation in his voice as he folded and pocketed the note he had been taping to her door.

  “Actually, you’re a day early,” Jessica said, not quite unmasking her own irritation with the man’s righteous tone.

  “No, ma’am. We called.” He waved toward the truck. A tall man, perhaps matched as the squat man’s partner to provide an extra foot and a half of reach, exited the truck and walked toward the back.

  “I didn’t g—”

  “Can you show me where you want us to put everything?”

  Jessica resigned herself to replacing a day of law with a day of movers and stepped around the man to unlock the door. The lubrication-challenged hinges protested with a grating squeal when she pushed open the heavy wooden door.

  Gracie, a labradoodle, more doodle than Lab, barked once at the man with the clipboard then nuzzled Jessica’s hand, knowing, as dogs do, what her owner needed.

  Jessica shooed Gracie away and directed the man to the parlor to the right of the front door.

  The man peered into the room then back at Jessica. “We’re gonna need some open floor space, ma’am. There’s a lot of boxes out in the truck.”

  “To reiterate, I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow, so I hadn’t cleared any space yet.” Jessica set her purse by the stairs and moved to the parlor. “But we can do it now.” She started to move the ottoman, sofa, and end tables out of the way, chucking her heels toward the stairs after nearly tumbling into a corner lamp. She had apparently been presumptuous with her use of the word “we,” expecting that a moving guy would help her move things, but he just stood in the entryway, watching the amateur.

  He nodded when she finished, as if approving a child’s first attempt at a new task. “Should work. We’ll get started.” The man propped open the front door with a rubber doorstop he pulled out of his back pocket and walked toward the man standing at the back of the truck.

  “Thanks for your help,” Jessica said sarcastically, though not loud enough for him to hear, before picking up her shoes and her bag. Heading up the stairs to change out of her fancy lawyer clothes, Jessica ran her hand along the smooth handrail, reflexively rubbing a spot halfway up where she had used the wrong-colored filler to cover a nailhead. Danny swore no one else noticed it, but to Jessica, it looked like some half-assed job done on one of those DIY shows. It had been one of her earlier projects, and she had since learned to match fillers and stains properly.

  The buzzing phone in her purse bumped DIY lamentations out of her mind. Seeing “Betty” on the screen, Jessica stopped on the top step. She answered on the fifth ring, just before it switched over to voice mail.

  “Hi, Mom,” Jessica said.

  “Is the truck there?” her mom asked.

  “Yes. How did you know? It’s a day early.”

  “They called me to let me know they were ahead of schedule.” Her mom paused. “Shoot, I meant to text you and completely forgot.”

  Jessica closed her bedroom door so she could change. “I wish you had let me know. I had a client meeting this morning and would have missed the truck if... if it had gone on any longer.”

  “A client meeting? For what?”

  Jessica hadn’t told her mom about the pro bono job and didn’t want to, especially now that there wasn’t one. “Just some volunteer stuff I’m working on.”

  “I figured it would be okay. You indicated last time we talked that you were around during the days now that you have another driver in the family and you’re not in charge of the fall gala and most of those school committees.”

  “I do have other responsibilities, believe it or not.” Jessica put the phone on speaker and set it on the dresser so she could hang up her slacks and jacket. “I still think it’s crazy that I’m the one doing this. I get that Oma wanted me to be the executor of her estate because of the lawyer thing, but to ship a truck full of her things halfway across the country...” Jessica didn’t need to remind her mom that she was far away. Jessica had pu
t twelve hundred miles between them when she left for law school, though she’d added the real distance later. “Surely Kenny or Jason or you could have gone through it all.”

  “Your brothers don’t have the time, and I simply don’t have the space now that I’ve downsized. I guess you haven’t seen my new condo. Well, not new.” And there was the dig. Her mom had moved four years ago, and Jessica hadn’t visited.

  An uncomfortable silence filled the room through the speakerphone. Jessica grabbed a pair of jeans off a shelf and shoved her feet through the openings.

  “I don’t know that we’ll have the space, either. I don’t have an attic like Oma did.”

  “No one said you have to keep everything, or anything.”

  Jessica bristled at her mother’s tone, trying to decide whether it was exasperation or disappointment she heard. Probably both.

  “You are welcome to throw it all out. She just wanted you to go through it all and distribute or donate as you see fit. Maybe you’ll find a treasure or two.”

  As a little girl, Jessica had loved to tag along with her grandmother to get something from the dusty alcove hidden by the door in the ceiling. Oma had always seemed to be reorganizing her things, sorting them in meticulously labeled boxes. Whether it was a box of old children’s books, a stash of county-fair ribbons, or a board tacked with old campaign buttons, all were treasures to a curious child.

  A shout muffled by the closed bedroom door interrupted her mental trip to the attic. “Ma’am? Can you help with the dog?”

  “Shit. Mom, I need to go. Gracie is trying to guard all of the treasures. I need to go get her before the moving guys kill her.” She threw on one of Danny’s regatta T-shirts and opened the door.

  “I understand.” Her mom sounded far away, as though she’d turned away from her phone to attend to something.

  Gracie barked, sending an echo up the stairway and prompting another call from the mover. “Ma’am?”

  “Gotta go, Mom.” Jessica slid the phone into her back pocket and got to the stairs just in time to see the movers bash a trunk into the wooden framing around the parlor entrance.

  Gracie barked. Good girl. Gracie knew all the work that had gone into this house.

  “Let’s go, girl.” Jessica grabbed the dog by the collar and led her past the dark stairway. Jessica had originally wanted to paint all the dark wood in the house to lighten things up and maybe give the place the beach-cottage look that was so common in the area. She had envisioned white wainscoting against walls painted the colors of sea glass. That style was not unlike the suit that now hung in her closet, a style that would have been wholly unfamiliar to her before she’d left small-town Idaville, Iowa.

  But having three kids while working in a white-shoe law firm left no time for home improvement, and by the time she left H&C just over ten years ago, she had grown to love the Arts and Crafts styling of the house and had learned to appreciate the sturdiness and structure of the dark beams and moldings.

  She had refinished the wood herself while getting her stay-at-home-mom “degree” in woodworking online during nap times and when the kids were at school. The amount of woodwork in the home was impressive, but once relieved of lawyer’s hours, Jessica had not only had the time but had also welcomed the intense and sometimes intricate task of refurbishing the wood. The original craftsmanship that had gone into the details revealed itself even now as Jessica moved from the stairway back to the kitchen, admiring box beams and built-in benches.

  Thanks to a prior owner who’d removed a wall, the kitchen was open to the family room, complete with its original drafty brick fireplace. The open room was the typical family gathering place, which would explain the mess that faced her as she walked in. Tuning out the sound of the movers’ steel-toed boots on the wood floors in the entryway, Jessica attacked the dirty dishes in the sink, the newspapers strewn across the counter, a couple of green-clover marshmallows on the floor that Gracie’s canine nose had somehow failed to sniff out, and some dirty soccer socks curiously placed on the kitchen table.

  Each completed task pushed thoughts of the meeting with Amina further away.

  Jessica scanned the room and ran through her mental checklist to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. Green apples sat above red apples in the fruit bowl, and fresh sunflowers from the garden had replaced their droopy predecessors. The newspaper lay folded neatly on the end table next to the couch, and the dirty soccer socks had disappeared. The kitchen table glistened, and the smell of lemon zest lingered in the air. It was almost as if the morning had never even happened, at least if she didn’t think about what was being unloaded into the parlor.

  Jessica had missed out on one last attic visit when Oma broke her hip about seven or eight years ago and had to move into the assisted living facility. When Jessica thought about it, she realized she hadn’t been in that attic since before she’d left for college. She had no idea what Oma had ended up keeping. After Jessica had gotten a place of her own and began taking pride in the simplicity of her space and not accumulating things for the sake of accumulation, she wondered if Oma might have been a bit of a hoarder. The mere fact that these things had been tucked away in an attic suggested there was no reason to keep them.

  “Ma’am? We’re done.”

  Jessica jumped, surprised she hadn’t heard the boots approaching. The squat man with the clipboard leaned in through the kitchen doorway.

  That hadn’t taken very long. Maybe Oma had gone through a decluttering phase and the mover had overestimated the floor space they would need.

  Jessica walked to the entryway. Holy shit. Oma had not decluttered. The moving guys were just really efficient. Stacks and stacks of boxes greeted her, some even placed in the dining room off the entryway and opposite the parlor. A jagged gash scarred the doorframe. The culprit, a vaguely familiar trunk, sat lodged among the boxes. Each box declared its contents via black Sharpie: My Mementos, Mother’s Dishes, My Glassware, My Quilt. Betty. The box with her mom’s things probably should have stayed in Iowa.

  Oma had clearly been busy before she went to the assisted living facility, having done one last reorganization. And all of that reorganization disrupted the order Jessica had just reestablished. This unboxing was going to take longer than she had anticipated, though the morning’s events cleared up her schedule considerably for the foreseeable future.

  The man handed Jessica the clipboard. She reviewed the delivery invoice, which included a detailed list of the boxes and the contents as noted by the black marker, and scanned the rooms to compare. She took her time, partly because that was what she would normally do—dot the i’s and cross the t’s—but mostly to be passive-aggressive toward the man who stood fidgeting next to her. After everything checked out, Jessica signed the form and handed it back.

  Jessica turned slowly as she creaked the door shut, facing off against the box-filled rooms flanking her. She would open one box, just to get an idea of what she was dealing with, then come up with a plan of attack.

  Poking among the boxes in the parlor, she spied a smallish box marked “Open this box first.” It triggered thoughts of Alice in Wonderland, but it did make the decision easy. After grabbing a pair of scissors from the kitchen, Jessica carefully sliced the clear packing tape that sealed the box, hoping not to find a bespectacled white rabbit inside.

  The floral notes of Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds perfume wafted out of the box as Jessica folded back the cardboard flaps. Oma. Jessica’s jaw muscles relaxed at the scent. She must have been clenching her teeth since she’d left Baltimore.

  At the top of the box sat an unsealed lavender envelope.

  Oma’s handwriting was unmistakable. Each tiny letter was schoolhouse perfect, and each line was written as though she had used a ruler as a guide. The “Dear Jessica” with the tree-stump r and flowing J made Jessica recall countless letters she’d received in college, law school, and beyond. Most of Oma’s letters had included a newspaper clipping of a story from home t
hat she thought Jessica would like or coupons from the Sunday circular. Those letters had always included a return envelope, stamped and addressed to Oma. Jessica hated herself a little bit at the memory of throwing a stack of those out at the end of every term.

  Dear Jessica,

  These boxes contain my memories and memories of my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, etc. I could never get rid of these things, even though I couldn’t take them to the ‘Old Folks Home’ with me. They are full of history. I’ve included notes in each box. I never wrote my memoirs, but maybe these notes are little bits and pieces!

  Oma

  Under the wadded-up yellowed newspaper—Canned Yams $.69 at Family Grocery!—the “Open this box first” box revealed a plain metal box.

  The smell of stale cigars and aged paper caught her off guard as she removed the lid from the container. She closed her eyes and inhaled. Oma was clever, starting her off with this box. Jessica opened her eyes and started to leaf through the newspaper clippings inside. Then she gasped, and her eyes filled just enough that she had to blink to staunch any tears from falling. The headline read, “Local Employee Recognized by Postal Service.” The bald man with the jug ears was grinning in the photo. The gap between his front teeth and the Kirk Douglas chin triggered a smile of remembrance. Jessica rubbed her own dimpleless chin. Loved it on you, Gramps.

  He stood next to a wooden desk, with his right hand, as always, in his pocket. It was one of those old oak desks found in any government building back then—nothing fancy, no shiny lacquer or inlaid ebony, but it was heavy as hell and built to last. Gramps was just that: nothing fancy but solid and reliable.

  That particular wooden desk was the one he would sneak Jessica and her brothers back to when they visited him at the post office. He would get fired, he’d told them conspiratorially, if anyone found out he let anyone in the back office. But they were worth the risk, he would say. The top left drawer had always been full of Brach’s caramels. They would each get one. Well, the boys would get one, and Gramps would palm an extra to Jessica with a wink. “Cuz you’re my other good-luck charm. You’re the prettiest and the smartest, and I know you’ll show your brothers a thing or two someday.”