The linoleum under my cart had that same greasy slip to it that every Kroger in eastern Tennessee seemed to share on a rainy Tuesday morning, and I was just trying to decide if the yellow onions looked firm enough to bother with when the world stopped turning.
Fifty-six years is a long time to keep a hole in your heart.
Back in the spring of 1968, when I was sixteen and thought the end of the world was whatever boy had stopped talking to me in the cafeteria, I lost the only thing my mother left me. It was a small gold locket, nothing fancy, just a thin stamped circle with a tiny floral engraving on the front. Inside was a single picture of her taken on Easter Sunday, just three months before the doctors shook their heads and pulled the white sheet up over her chin. I had it on a light chain that snagged on the collar of my cardigan while I was rushing for the crosstown bus. I didn’t notice it was gone until I sat down on the wooden bench at the station and felt the naked skin at the hollow of my throat.
I remember running all the way back up the sidewalk, my Keds slapping against the hot concrete, but the street was empty except for a stray dog sniffing a milk carton.
I checked the transit office every single Saturday for three months. Mr. Henderson behind the glass counter knew me by name, and every time I walked in, he would just shake his head before I could even open my mouth. After a while, I stopped going. You grow up, you get a job at the county records office, you marry a good man who helps you raise two kids who never cared much about old jewelry, and you learn to live with the ghosts of things you dropped along the way.
Then came last Tuesday. I was standing by the bulk bins, turning over a bag of dry lentils, when I noticed a woman watching me from near the celery. She wasn’t glaring or anything like that. She had kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a dark wool coat that looked a little too heavy for October. Every time I moved down the row, she sort of drifted closer, like she wanted to ask where the honey was kept.
I figured she was just another retiree looking for someone to talk to about the price of beef.
She waited until I reached for a plastic produce bag before she stepped right into my path. She didn’t say excuse me. She just reached up with fingers that were shaking slightly and touched the small gold disc hanging against the dark wool of her sweater.
“Excuse me,” she said, her voice dropping down into that quiet register people use when they are standing in a hospital hallway or a church vestibule. “I need to ask you something kind of crazy.”
I pulled my hand back from the roll of bags, my fingers curling into my palm. I looked at her face, really looked at her, and something cold and sharp went sliding right down my spine. It wasn’t that I recognized her. It was the shape of her cheekbones, and the way her lower lip pushed out just a fraction when she was nervous.
It was like looking into a very old, slightly smudged mirror from a house I hadn’t lived in since I was a girl.
“What is it?” I asked, and my voice sounded thinner than I wanted it to.
She didn’t waste any time. She reached up with her right hand, her thumbnail catching the tiny spring-loaded edge of the metal circle, and popped it open. She held it out toward me on the flat of her palm, the little gold lid catching the harsh fluorescent light above the lettuce misting nozzles.
Inside was the Easter photograph. There was my mother, wearing that straw hat with the faded pink ribbon, smiling with her head tilted just a little to the left. The paper was slightly yellowed at the corners where I had jammed it in with a pair of tweezers back in sixty-eight, trying to get it to sit flat against the brass.
“I bought it at a flea market up in Knoxville back in 1990,” she said, and her eyes were shining with tears she wasn’t trying to hide. “I wore it every day. I didn’t know whose it was. But when I moved into your neighborhood last month and started seeing you at the post office and here in the store, it finally clicked. Same eyes. Same chin.”
I couldn’t breathe. The whole aisle seemed to tilt sideways, the rows of canned soup blurring into long red and silver streaks. I reached out, my hand trembling worse than hers, and my index finger brushed the warm metal edge of the locket. It was lighter than I remembered, or maybe my hands were just older and weaker.
“You’ve had this for thirty-four years?” I whispered.
“Since the winter of ninety,” she said softly. Her name was Claire, she told me a minute later when we finally moved away from the celery and sat down in two of the hard plastic chairs near the store pharmacy. She kept the locket resting in her open palm between us, refusing to close it, as if keeping my mother’s face out in the open air would somehow protect us both from waking up.
We sat there for twenty minutes while the pharmacist called out prescription numbers over the loudspeaker and mothers pushed screaming toddlers past in wire baskets. Claire told me about her own mother passing away when she was young, leaving her with a house full of empty rooms and a hunger for things that felt anchored to the earth. She found the locket in a rusted biscuit tin underneath a table piled with old National Geographics at a church bazaar off Kingston Pike. The old man running the booth didn’t know where it came from; he said it was part of an estate box from down toward Sweetwater.
“I didn’t have nobody back then,” Claire said, looking down at the gold circle with a tenderness that made my throat ache. “My husband had just left for good, and my job at the telephone company was ending because they were automating the switchboards. I used to touch that little face every morning before I went out to look for work. I told myself whoever she was, she looked like she knew how to weather a storm. She was like a little guardian angel I bought for three dollars.”
I listened to her talk, and the years between sixteen and seventy-four seemed to collapse like a cheap accordion. I remembered the exact afternoon I lost it at the bus stop on Market Street. It was raining that day too, a cold spring drizzle that smelled of coal smoke and wet wool. I had been crying because my algebra teacher had failed me on a test I studied all night for, and I was mad at the world, and I had yanked my coat collar up around my neck so hard the thin jump ring must have snapped right then and there. I left it sitting on that green wooden bench, or it slid down between the slats into the dirt where the city maintenance crews never swept.
“I looked everywhere for this,” I told her, my voice cracking right down the middle. “My dad drove me down to the transit lost and found four Saturdays in a row. I thought somebody stole it.”
“Nobody stole it,” Claire said, her hand reaching across the sticky laminate table to cover my knuckles. “It just went on a long trip. It took its time getting back to where it started.”
She didn’t ask for any money. She didn’t even ask for a reward, though God knows I would have emptied my purse onto that plastic table if she had asked. Instead, she took the thin gold chain from around her own neck, the clasp small and familiar between her fingers, and held the whole thing up.
“It belongs to you,” she said. “It always did. I was just keeping the seat warm for it.”
She reached around behind my neck before I could argue, her fingers cool against the nape of my hair where the gray curls always stuck out no matter how much hairspray I used. I felt the tiny click of the spring ring closing. The metal settled right against the hollow of my throat, exactly where it had hung fifty-six years ago when the world was smaller and my mother was still here to tell me everything was going to be all right.
We sat there in those hard plastic chairs for another ten minutes, just talking about nothing, the price of heating oil, how the traffic on Route 11 had gotten unbearable since they put in the new shopping center, and how hard it was to find a decent loaf of rye bread anymore. It wasn’t the kind of high drama you see in the movies where people fall weeping into each other’s arms in the middle of the produce section. We were two old women in sensible shoes sitting next to the blood pressure machine at Kroger, quietly handing back a piece of the past like it was a borrowed cup of sugar.
When we finally stood up to leave, Claire gave me her telephone number written on the back of a grocery receipt with a blue ballpoint pen that skipped on the slick paper. We promised to meet for coffee at the diner down by the railroad tracks next Thursday, just the two of us, so she could tell me more about what she was doing in 1990 when she first found my mother’s face in that rusty tin.
I walked out through the automatic sliding doors into the gray afternoon drizzle, the rain hitting my face with that same cold snap I remembered from nineteen sixty-eight. I didn’t hurry to the car. I stood under the metal awning for a long moment, my hand pressed flat against the front of my coat, feeling the small, steady weight of the locket resting right over my heart.
When I got home, the house was quiet the way it always was since Arthur passed away three winters ago. The grandfather clock in the hall was ticking with that slow, heavy swing that used to drive me crazy when I was trying to sleep. I didn’t turn on the television or even take off my raincoat right away. I walked straight down the narrow hallway to the bathroom and switched on the vanity light above the sink.
I stood there in front of the mirror, looking past the wrinkles around my eyes and the sagging skin of my throat, right down to where the gold disc caught the light. I reached up with both hands, my fingers finding the little latch, and popped it open one more time.
My mother looked back at me from 1968, young and untouched by time, her small smile frozen in the brass frame. I looked at her eyes, and then I looked at my own in the glass, and for the first time in more than half a century, the sixteen-year-old girl who lost her at a bus stop finally came home.
I closed the locket with a soft, clean click, fastened the clasp tight at the back of my neck, and turned off the light.
