Chapter 2 - WHAT THE LOCKET MEANT
Mara gave Eva the locket herself.
That mattered more to me than its value.
The silver was not rare.
The photograph was not professionally taken.
The chain had been replaced twice.
But Mara had chosen it.
She had been ill for eleven months before she died.
Cancer.
Aggressive enough that every treatment conversation eventually became a conversation about time.
We never told Eva:
Mommy is dying.
She was too young to understand the future tense adults were trying to survive.
We said:
Mommy is very sick.
Mommy needs hospital.
Mommy gets tired.
Near the end, Mara started preparing objects.
Not an inheritance strategy.
Not a grand archive.
Ordinary things.
A scarf.
Three letters for later birthdays.
Her grandmother’s recipe cards.
A necklace for Eva when she turned eighteen.
The locket for now.
I was in the room when Mara gave it to her.
Eva was twenty-two months old.
Mara opened the locket.
“That’s Mommy.”
Eva touched the tiny picture.
“Mama.”
Mara smiled.
“And that’s you.”
Eva looked very seriously at her own baby face.
Then tried to bite the locket.
Mara laughed until she coughed.
That was the memory.
After Mara died, Eva wore the locket when she asked.
Not every day.
Sometimes she forgot it for weeks.
Then found it and refused to remove it at bath time.
We followed her pace.
At least I thought we did.
When Celeste entered our lives, she did not object at first.
She once helped untangle the chain.
Once cleaned fingerprints from the photograph.
Once told Eva:
“Your mommy was very pretty.”
All of that was real.
That made the dinner harder to understand.
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People prefer villainy to arrive complete.
It rarely does.
