by Karen White
“When you first came to live with them, your grandmother planned to give you something that had meant a lot to her when she was a young woman.” He paused briefly, his brows furrowed with seeming incomprehension. “I guess she never found the right time to give it to you because your grandfather gave it to me for safekeeping when he put Annabelle in the home. I thought that you should have it now.”
I dragged my attention away from the window, aware that he was awaiting a response from me. I struggled for a moment to capture his last words. “Something from my grandmother?”
Mr. Morton took a sealed envelope from the inside of his jacket and handed it to me. There was a small lump inside and my name had been written with my grandmother’s meticulous cursive. I glanced at Mr. Morton and he nodded his head in encouragement before I dug my nail under the flap of the envelope and ripped it open.
I peered inside, looking for a letter or a note. I cupped my hand and tipped the envelope over, shaking it until whatever had been stuck at the bottom came tumbling out into my palm.
Mr. Morton leaned toward me and we both stared at my prize, a gold charm of an angel holding an opened book. I shook the envelope again, waiting for the chain to fall out, but the envelope was empty.
“There’s not even a note,” I said, turning the charm over in my hand, wondering why she had held on to it for so long without giving it to me and feeling an odd disappointment.
Mr. Morton took my hand, squeezing it hard enough to almost be painful. “No, there wouldn’t be. Annabelle had always planned to give it to you in person. It’s a part of your grandmother’s history—part of her life she would want you to know.”
I stood, uneasy with his intensity. “I’ll take good care of it. And I’ll look for the chain, too. Maybe it’s somewhere in her old room.”
He stared at me for a long moment and I thought he hadn’t understood what I said. While I prepared to paraphrase slowly and clearly, Mr. Morton said, “You do that, young lady.” He stood and faced me, a concentrated look on his withered face. “You never know what you’ll find.”
Uncomfortable, I waited for him to gather his things, then quickly led the way back to the foyer.
“You’re a pretty young lady, Piper. I’m sure your grandfather would want you to move on. To find a young man and get married. Start a family of your own.”
“You mean sell the house?”
Mr. Morton shrugged. “That’s certainly a possibility. Even after making allowances for your grandmother’s care, with the remainder of your parents’ and grandparents’ estates, you’ll have a nice little nest egg. Maybe you’ll want to travel for a bit.”
I opened the front door, hearing the distant sound of the church bells. “There’s no place I want to go. Besides, with my back and knee, I don’t think long-distance travel would be a good idea.”
He regarded me quietly. “It’s not always the distance of a trip that determines its value. Sometimes the best trips are only as far as the circumference of your heart.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he said, “Speaking of trips, Matilda and I are going on a four-month excursion around the coast of South America. It’s been a dream of hers for a long time and I finally figured that now’s as good a time as ever. You might be able to reach me by e-mail, but that would be sporadic at best. If you need something immediately, you can call my office and George will be happy to take care of you.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to flinch at the mention of George’s name and impatient now for Mr. Morton to leave. His words had unsettled me and all I wanted was to go back to my darkening parlor and think about all I had lost.
He stepped outside onto the brick steps and pulled an old-fashioned gold watch out of his pocket. A gold key fob dangled from the chain as he studied the clock face and frowned before shoving it back in his pocket. “One more thing. Matilda asked me to find out if her family tree is ready yet.”
Dabbling in genealogy and delving into other people’s family secrets had been the riskiest behavior I’d allowed myself to be involved in since my riding accident six years earlier. I frowned, knowing that my answer would not be something Mrs. Morton would want to hear. “Tell her almost. But I haven’t been able to find any connection between her family and the British royal family as she thought there might have been. Although I have found a family connection to sheep farmers in Yorkshire.”
He stared at me blankly for a long moment. Finally, he said,“I’ll let you tell her that yourself.”
“Just feed me to the alligators instead,” I muttered to myself as he turned away. I imagined his imperious wife, whose aspiration to grandiosity was equal only to her disdain for me for having had the bad taste to have been born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, regardless of the fact that both my parents had been born and raised in Savannah.
Mr. Morton faced me again abruptly, almost making me startle. “I heard that, you know.”
I smiled, my face feeling stretched and unused to the movement of turning up my lips. “Good-bye, Mr. Morton,” I said as I closed the heavy door with the black wreath hanging from it.
I watched him through the leaded glass of the door, trying again to find the tears for the grandfather who had raised me since I was six. I absently fingered the small charm in my hand and blinked hard, willing the grief to find me. But I could only stand there, dry-eyed, as I watched Mr. Morton slowly make his way down the walk toward the square with the statue honoring a fallen war hero. And I wondered, not for the first time, if dying in the quest for glory wasn’t far better than surviving with the livid scars of failure for all to see.
CHAPTER 2
I woke up with a stiff neck and something small and hard pressed into the side of my hip. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa again in the absence of a grandfather to tell me to go upstairs to bed. I sat up, rotating my neck while digging under my hip for the protruding object. It was the small gold charm and I picked it up, a misplaced sense of excitement filling me for a moment. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because a quest for the missing chain might distract me long enough that I might forget about the rest of my life.
I shuffled to the kitchen, my knee and back joining in protest with my neck. I opened the refrigerator for my morning Coke, belatedly remembering the sad display of hospitality I’d shown to Mr. Morton with the remnants of my last can of Coke rescued from the back shelf. Covered casseroles, assorted salads, and a large ham, courtesy of a misplaced sense of duty on behalf of neighbors, my grandfather’s former business associates, and church members, crammed the small space. It was the Savannah way of feeding bereavement, as if all that grieving required extra caloric input. I hadn’t so much as lifted a corner of foil wrap, feeling guilty for not having earned any of it. I had yet to shed a single tear.
“Dang it,” I said to the empty kitchen as I slammed the refrigerator door. Something clattered on the wood floor and I belatedly realized that I’d been holding the charm in my hand and had dropped it when I’d slammed the door. With unaccustomed alarm, I got down on all fours, forgetting to favor my right knee, and began to search for the charm.
I found it resting on the floor, propped next to the overflowing plastic garbage bin, as if a reminder that it needed to be emptied. I picked up the charm, then held it in the light from the kitchen window. Squinting, I studied the back of the opened book, my attention caught by thin black lines etched across the covers. Moving my head closer, I realized that the lines were actually writing but the words were too small for me to read. With as much enthusiasm as I could muster, I walked across the foyer to my grandfather’s study, pausing only a moment as the smell of pipe smoke made me think that I should have knocked on the door first.
I rifled through the desk drawers until I found the magnifying glass still resting on the top of the desk, where my grandfather had read the Sunday paper. A shadow of sadness drifted over me, stilling me for a moment as I willed the grief to come. But I remained as numb and helpless as I had been for the last six
years and even that thought couldn’t bring the tears I needed to shed. I held the metal handle in my hand, imagining it still warm from my grandfather’s touch. Instead it felt cold and impersonal as I brought it over to the window to see better.
I held up the charm and the magnifying glass and brought them closer to my eye. Turning the charm around to see the inscription on the book’s covers, I read it out loud. Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim. I looked up, hearing the words as I’d read them. Wasn’t that Latin? I read the inscription again, racking my brain for the high school Latin that I’d done my best to forget in the intervening years.
Putting the magnifying glass back on my grandfather’s desk, I turned to the shelves of books in the off chance that any of my old Latin textbooks might have been saved over the years. Granddaddy never wanted to have anything to do with computers and I didn’t feel up to climbing two flights of stairs to get to my own. And by looking through the library, I was guaranteed that my search would eat up most of the empty morning.
With breakfast forgotten, I spent an hour going through my grandfather’s books and finding nothing remotely resembling anything that would help me translate the Latin phrase. I was about to leave the room when I spied the antique sea captain’s trunk under one of the windows.
My grandmother had used it to keep her knitting projects, including the sweaters and scarves she’d made for me that never quite fit or suited me and which I’d never worn. I had never been curious about the trunk’s contents before, but something made me pause before it, a fleeting memory of my grandmother kneeling before it with creaking knees to place something inside.
Slipping the charm into my pocket, I knelt on the floor and lifted the lid. The overpowering stench of mothballs made my eyes sting as I averted my face for a moment to allow the contents to air out. I began rummaging through the trunk quickly, pushing aside old knitting projects and half-used balls of brightly colored yarn that even at the time when my grandmother was knitting, had seemed so out-of-character for her. She always wore drab browns and grays yet all of her projects for me were created out of bright pinks and yellows, pale blues and the amber hues of the marsh at sunset.
My fingers sifted through the soft wool until they scraped the bottom of the trunk and my fingernail flicked something small and hard. I tugged on it and found myself lifting out a very small pale blue sweater. My finger had found one of the mother-of-pearl buttons that closed the sweater in front in a tiny, neat row. I looked at the sweater for a long time, wondering who it could have belonged to.
My reverie was broken by the sound of the phone ringing. I picked up the old black princess model on the desk. “Hello?”
“Hello, Piper. It’s Mr. Morton. Matilda and I are heading for the airport shortly but I wanted to give you a call before we left just to make sure you’re all right.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Morton. Thank you,” I said, meaning it, my annoyance at the phone’s intrusion into my solitude forgotten.
“I know you haven’t had a lot of time to think about our conversation yesterday, so I won’t ask about your plans just yet. Just wanted to know if you had any last-minute questions before I leave the country.”
I was about to say no when I had a sudden thought. I dug the small charm out of my pocket. “Actually, I do. Being a lawyer, you probably know a bit of Latin, right?”
There was a long pause, and then Mr. Morton said, “I don’t really follow baseball, Piper, so I don’t know how the Marlins are doing.”
I bit my lip, but before I could repeat my question, Mr. Morton let out a low chuckle.
“I’m pulling your leg, Piper. I heard you the first time. Matilda makes me wear my hearing aid while I’m traveling with her because otherwise I drive her crazy. What she doesn’t know is that I can turn the thing off and leave it in my ear and she won’t have any idea.”
I smiled into the phone. “I promise it’ll be our secret, Mr. Morton.”
“So, what did you want translated?”
I brought the charm up to my eye, squinting as I read out loud, “Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.”
He cleared his throat. “That’s Ovid. It means ‘Be patient and strong; someday this pain will be useful to you.’ ” He paused for a moment. “Where did you hear that?”
“It was on the charm from my grandmother that you gave me.”
I heard him take a deep breath. “It sounds like something she’d say.”
“Funny,” I said, leaning back against the desk,“I was thinking just the opposite. I mean, Grandmother wasn’t really the type to be profound or even sentimental enough to have a favorite verse put on a charm.”
He was silent for a moment. “And that’s where you would be wrong, Piper. Very wrong.”
“Pardon me for disagreeing with you, Mr. Morton, but I just don’t see it that way.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. You never really knew your grandmother.”
I swallowed my irritation. “Mr. Morton, I lived with her for six years and have been visiting her almost daily since I was twelve. I think that qualifies me as knowing her.”
“Studying the cover of a book doesn’t qualify you to discuss its contents, you know.”
I felt my anger rise as my stomach grumbled, reminding me that I hadn’t eaten. I didn’t reply.
“Is there anything else, Piper? Matilda has grabbed her umbrella, which means she’s ready to go.”
I wanted to tell him where he could stick that umbrella but I held back. I remembered the sweater and reluctantly spoke again. “I found something else in my grandmother’s trunk. A small knitted blue sweater. As far as I know, both my mother and I were only children with no brothers. I was just wondering if you had any idea who it might have belonged to.”
There was a long pause but this time I knew that it wasn’t because he couldn’t hear me and I felt a tingle of anticipation dance down my spine, raising the hair on the back of my neck.
“Mr. Morton?”
“Our taxi is here and I really have to go now, Piper.”
“Mr. Morton, do you know something about this sweater?”
I heard the sound of a honking horn and then Mr. Morton spoke again. “Your grandmother was a lot stronger than you think, Piper. Maybe you should go visit her.”
The sound of a car honking sounded again through the receiver.
“I really must go now, Piper. Don’t hesitate to call George if you should need anything. Good-bye, dear.”
I kept the receiver pressed against my ear, listening to the dial tone for a long time, trying to figure out what in the hell Mr. Morton had been trying to tell me and why I should even care.
I made myself go to the grocery to buy more Coke and frozen dinners, the thought of heating up a casserole just for me completely unappealing. My conversations with Mr. Morton and my discovery of the blue sweater had made me think of my grandmother and I found myself purchasing cornmeal, okra, and green tomatoes—the old comfort foods that she had made for me as a child.
I knew that I should visit her, but her presence at my grandfather’s funeral had been exhausting as I fielded her repetitive questions and reintroduced her to relatives and friends she’d known for fifty years. She’d been utterly lost, and after a while I stopped reminding her whose funeral we were attending. To her, Granddaddy would always be alive, and it gave me some comfort to know that she would never be truly alone.
But I needed to go visit her. I would do it soon, if only to ask her why she would have thought to caution me about patience, strength, and pain.
I placed my grocery bags in the backseat of the old Buick, trying not to see my grandfather in his worn straw hat at the wheel, signaling his turns with his left hand because the fuse for his blinkers had blown out and he hadn’t wanted to part with the cash to replace it.
As I drove around our square toward East Taylor, the moss-draped oaks teased me with intermittent sun and shadow, the old houses staring stoically at the squ
are and at me as I passed, defying time and climate simply by remaining. In front of my house I paused, the antique beauty of the Savannah gray brick town house and delicate wrought-iron railings never lost on me. I think it was because the first time I’d seen it, it had been a place a refuge following the death of my parents. Even afterward, when I’d begun to think of my grandmother’s house as a place of sadness and shadows, it was still the place I called home. If it held any secrets, I was kept blissfully unaware of them.
I pulled into a spot on the curb, belatedly remembering that I had given my front-door key to the funeral director so he could unload the funeral flowers and place them inside for the wake while I wasn’t home. I sighed heavily, eyeing the three bags in the backseat and deciding whether I could balance all three while I cut through the side garden and made my way to the backyard.
I had set down one of the bags in an empty flower bed in the backyard to readjust the load when I heard the front doorbell ring. Leaving the bag on the ground, I unlocked the back door and ran inside, dropping the two bags on the kitchen counter before rushing through the house to the front door.
George Baker, an associate in Mr. Morton’s law firm in addition to being Mr. Morton’s grandson, stood on the front steps with an appropriate look of condolence on his face and a blue-and-white seersucker suit on his thin-framed body. He wasn’t a bad-looking man, but his relentless pursuit of me since I had returned to Savannah six years before had made me wary and I avoided any contact with him with the same amount of effort I applied to avoiding any reminders of my past. He was also the only person of my acquaintance who insisted on calling me by my given name instead of the nickname my grandfather had given me the first time I’d sat on a horse.
