Martha hadn’t meant to stare at the bride’s throat during the reception, but the blue stone caught the candlelight in a way she couldn’t ignore.
At 68, Martha had spent the last two years grieving her husband, David, a man who had loved her fiercely until a sudden heart attack took him. She was doing her best to smile tonight. Her closest friend of forty years, Eleanor, was marrying David’s younger brother, Robert. It was a beautiful, bittersweet evening in the church fellowship hall.
But as Eleanor leaned over the punch bowl, laughing at a joke, the silver necklace slipped out from beneath the lace collar of her gown.
It was a teardrop sapphire, surrounded by tiny, flawed diamonds. Martha’s breath hitched. David had bought her that exact necklace for their thirtieth anniversary. He had come home completely devastated three days later, claiming he had lost the velvet box on the subway before he could even give it to her.
Martha set her paper cup on the table, her hands trembling. She walked over to her oldest friend, forcing a polite smile.
“That’s a beautiful necklace, Eleanor,” Martha said quietly. “I’ve never seen you wear it before.”
Eleanor’s laughter instantly died. Her hand flew to her throat, her knuckles turning white as she tried to tuck the stone back under her lace collar. She wouldn’t look Martha in the eye.
“Robert gave it to me,” Eleanor whispered, taking a nervous step backward. “Just… just an old antique he found.”
Martha looked past Eleanor, locking eyes with Robert across the room.
He Wasn’t Surprised
Robert was standing by the cake table with a plastic fork in one hand and a paper plate in the other. He’d been about to eat a corner of the bottom tier, the one with the sugar roses that had slumped a little in the heat.
He put the plate down.
That was what Martha would remember later. He didn’t look confused or caught. He looked like a man who’d been standing at a bus stop for a very long time and had finally seen the bus turn the corner.
He said something to Pastor Gary Hatch, who was standing next to him explaining his gutters, and then he came across the hall. He had to weave between the folding chairs. Every one of them had ST. ANDREW’S METHODIST stenciled on the back in white paint, and somebody’s grandson had tied a balloon to one, and it bobbed as Robert bumped past it.
“Marty,” he said.
Nobody called her Marty. Nobody had called her Marty in two years.
“Where did you get that.” She didn’t make it a question. Thirty-one years as the front office secretary at P.S. 84 and she knew how to say a sentence so it didn’t need a question mark.
Robert looked at Eleanor. Eleanor looked at the floor, at her own shoes, which were ivory and which Martha had helped her pick out at Macy’s in March.
“Not here,” Robert said. “The kitchen. Please. Five minutes.”
Martha followed them. She didn’t decide to. Her feet did it.
And while she walked, she did math. She couldn’t help it; she’d always done math when she was upset, counting ceiling tiles, counting the days until June. Sixteen years ago. April of 2008. Eleanor had been in the middle of her divorce from Phil Doyle that spring. David had driven her to the lawyer’s office in Forest Hills twice, maybe three times, because Eleanor didn’t like the highway. Martha had packed them sandwiches.
She’d been grateful.
The Kitchen Smelled Like Ziti
The church kitchen was too bright. The big steel dishwasher was running a cycle, and it made a sound like someone breathing through a straw. Four foil trays of baked ziti sat on the counter under plastic wrap, sweating.
Eleanor stood by the sink with both hands over the stone now, like she was trying to keep it warm.
Martha said the ugly thing first. She said it before anybody else could talk, because if she waited, she’d lose her nerve, and she’d been losing her nerve politely for sixty-eight years.
“Was it you?” she said to Eleanor. “Was it the whole time? Or just that spring?”
Eleanor made a sound. Not a word.
“Jesus Christ, Martha,” Robert said. “No.”
“You think I’d…” Eleanor started, and couldn’t finish.
“I think you’re wearing my necklace at your wedding,” Martha said. “That’s what I think. I think my husband came home and sat on the edge of our bed and cried about a velvet box on the N train, and I held his hand, and I told him it didn’t matter. And now it’s on your neck. So you tell me what I should think, Ellie.”
Robert pulled out a step stool and sat on it. He was sixty-five and he’d had both knees done and he sat down like it hurt.
“David didn’t lose it,” he said. “He gave it to me.”
The dishwasher clunked into its rinse cycle.
“He gave it to me,” Robert said again, “and I pawned it. On Steinway Street. For two thousand six hundred dollars.”
What the Money Was For
Martha had known Robert drank. Everybody had known Robert drank. He’d shown up at their daughter Lisa’s high school graduation in 2005 smelling like a bar mat and tried to hug the principal, and Martha had told David that night, in the car, in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn where they’d gone for dinner: If you give that man one more dime, David, I mean it. I’ll go.
She hadn’t meant it.
She’d thought David knew she hadn’t meant it.
“It wasn’t just drinking,” Robert said. He was looking at the ziti, not at her. “It was cards. There was a game in the back of a place in Sunnyside. I owed a guy named Lenny Sloan thirty-eight hundred dollars, and Lenny had a friend who’d already put a brick through my windshield, and the next thing was going to be my hand. He told me which hand. He let me pick.”
Eleanor had come over and was standing behind him now, with one hand on his shoulder.
“I called David at work,” Robert said. “I was crying on a pay phone. I didn’t even know there were still pay phones. And he came to my apartment that night with the box in his coat pocket. He’d picked it up from the jeweler that afternoon. He hadn’t even gotten home with it yet.”
Martha found the edge of the counter behind her. The steel was cold and a little greasy.
“He said he couldn’t take it out of the bank,” Robert said. “Because you’d see. You did the checkbook.”
She did do the checkbook. She’d always done the checkbook.
“So he pawned it. Well, I pawned it, he stood there. And he took the rest out of the Christmas account.”
Martha remembered the Christmas account. She remembered it being twelve hundred dollars short that November and David saying the furnace guy had come while she was at work, and she’d been annoyed because the furnace was only four years old, and she’d called the company to complain and they’d had no record, and David had said, I paid cash, Marty, let it go, and she had. She’d let it go. She’d thought he was getting forgetful.
“He made me go into treatment,” Robert said. “That was the deal. He drove me to a place up in Kingston two weeks later. He said if I ever told you, he’d kill me himself. He said you’d been through enough with me.” Robert laughed a little, not because anything was funny. “He said you’d leave him. He actually believed that, Marty. He believed you’d leave.”
“I wouldn’t have left.”
“I know.”
“I would have screamed.”
“I know. He knew that part too.”
Sixteen years sober in March. Martha knew that number. She’d gone to the little cake thing at his sponsor’s house in Bayside last spring, Donna Kowalski’s house with the plastic on the dining room chairs. She had never once asked herself who had driven him to Kingston.
How Eleanor Knew
There was a part that still didn’t fit. Martha’s brain kept snagging on it the way your tongue goes back to a chipped tooth.
“You knew what it was,” she said to Eleanor. “Out there. You saw my face and you knew exactly what it was. How would you know? I never even saw it.”
Eleanor let go of the stone.
“Because I picked it out,” she said.
Martha didn’t say anything.
“He asked me to go with him. To Petrovic’s, on Queens Boulevard, the one that’s a Verizon store now. He didn’t trust himself. He wanted blue because of your mother’s ring, the one Lisa has. He liked a bigger one, with these perfect clear diamonds around it. It looked like something on a game show.” Eleanor’s voice was wobbling all over the place. “I told him to get this one. The little diamonds have things in them. Little cloudy bits. Mr. Petrovic was embarrassed about it. And I said, no, those are the good ones, those look like they have some personality. Like Martha. I said they looked like you. He laughed so hard he had to sit down.”
“That was supposed to be a surprise too,” Robert said. “That Ellie helped. He was going to tell you at dinner.”
Eleanor wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, which was going to wreck the lace on her sleeve, and neither of them told her.
“I found it three weeks ago,” she said. “Packing up his apartment. It was in his sock drawer in an envelope from a jewelry place in New Jersey. I knew it the second I opened it. I sat on his bed and I thought, oh my God, he stole it. He stole it from his own brother.”
“She threw a shoe at me,” Robert said.
“I did throw a shoe.”
Something Borrowed
The pawn ticket had been for ninety days. Robert had been in Kingston for sixty of them, and then in a halfway house in Poughkeepsie, and then working a job loading trucks at a lumberyard, and by the time he’d saved two thousand six hundred dollars plus the interest, it was the following February and the necklace was long gone. Sold.
“David told me to forget it,” Robert said. “Every year he told me. He said, it’s a rock, Bobby, Marty doesn’t even know it exists, let it go.”
But Robert hadn’t let it go. He’d called every pawn shop in Queens. He’d gone to estate sales on Saturdays for, by his count, eleven years, which Martha didn’t totally believe, but she didn’t argue. After David’s funeral he’d started looking online, which he was bad at, which was why it took so long.
Last October he’d found it on an estate jewelry website. A woman in Paramus. Her mother had bought it at a shop in Astoria in 2009 and worn it to church every Sunday until she died. Robert had printed the picture out and taken it to Mr. Petrovic’s son, who still had the store’s old sketch book in his garage, and the son had matched it in about four seconds.
Fifty-four hundred dollars.
“I was going to give it to you at Christmas,” Robert said. “And then I couldn’t figure out how. You hand somebody a dead man’s anniversary present, you gotta tell them why it’s late. And then I’d have to tell you he lied to you for my sake. And you’d hate him a little. Right at the end. After he’s gone and can’t explain himself.” He rubbed his face. “I didn’t want to be the guy who made you hate him even a little.”
“So you hid it in your socks.”
“So I hid it in my socks.”
Eleanor was the one who’d decided. After the shoe. She’d sat him down at his kitchen table and told him there wasn’t going to be any more lying in this family, she was marrying into it and she was done, and they were going to give it back on the wedding night, in front of God and the Methodists, and he was going to tell Martha everything.
“Something old, something new,” Eleanor said. “Something borrowed. I figured, I’ll wear it in. And when Bobby gives his toast, he takes it off me and he puts it on you. That was the plan. That was the whole plan.” She looked at the ceiling. “And then I had to go and lean over the stupid punch bowl.”
“You looked guilty as hell,” Martha said.
“I am guilty as hell. I’ve known for three weeks.”
“You called it an antique.”
“I panicked. It came out of my mouth.”
Martha thought about the drive to the lawyer’s office in Forest Hills. The sandwiches. Turkey on rye, both times, because Eleanor didn’t eat ham. She didn’t apologize for what she’d said. Not yet. She wasn’t ready, and Eleanor seemed to understand that, because she didn’t ask her to.
The Box Had Something In It
“There’s one more thing,” Robert said.
He reached into the inside pocket of his rented tuxedo jacket. The jacket was too big in the shoulders. Martha had noticed it during the vows and had a mean little thought about it, which she was now sorry for.
He took out an envelope. Small and square, the kind that comes with a gift card. It had gone soft at the corners and yellow along one edge. Her name was on the front.
Marty.
She knew the handwriting before she knew she knew it. She’d seen it on thirty-one years of sick notes and permission slips that he’d signed for Lisa, on grocery lists stuck to the fridge with the magnet shaped like a lobster, on the back of the last electric bill he ever paid.
“It was tucked in the lid of the velvet box,” Robert said. “When we went to pawn it. He forgot it was there. I found it in the box the night before I went to Kingston, and I didn’t give it back to him because I was drunk and stupid, and then I was sober and ashamed. And then he was gone.” He held it out. “I never opened it. I swear on my mother. I wanted to, every year. I never did.”
The flap had been tucked, not licked. It came open on the first try.
The card had a drawing of a sailboat on the front. Inside, in David’s blocky printing, in blue ink:
Marty,
30 years. On our second date at the Lums on Main Street you told me you’d never wear blue because it made you look like a drowned person. I’ve been waiting 30 years to prove you wrong.
Ellie helped pick it. Don’t be mad, she has better taste than me. She says the little diamonds look like you because they’ve got stuff in them. I said that’s not a compliment. She says it is.
Wear it someplace good. Wear it to Bobby’s wedding, if that idiot ever gets his act together and somebody will have him. I want to see you in the front row in blue, so I’ve got something to look at besides his terrible suit.
I’d do it all again. Even the Lums.
Love, D.
Martha read it twice. Then she read the last line a third time, and then she folded the card along its old crease and held it against her stomach, flat, with both hands, the way she used to hold the attendance folder when a fire drill went off.
“His suit is terrible,” she said.
Robert started laughing. Then he started crying. Then he was doing both, on a step stool in a church kitchen, and Eleanor had both arms around his head and was saying okay, okay, okay into his hair.
The Clasp
Eleanor reached behind her neck. Her fingers were shaking too much; she fumbled it, caught her hair in it, said a word Pastor Gary wouldn’t have liked.
“Here,” Martha said. “Turn around.”
She undid it herself. It was a tiny lobster clasp, the cheap kind, the kind that was always too small for anyone’s fingers. Somebody in New Jersey had probably cursed at it every Sunday.
Then she held it out to Robert.
“You do it,” she said. “That was the plan, wasn’t it? You stand up and do the toast and you do it in front of everybody.”
“Marty, you don’t have to…”
“He said front row. I’m not wearing it in a kitchen next to the ziti.”
The DJ was playing “Celebration” when they came back out. Somebody’s uncle was doing a move that involved his elbows. The balloon was still bobbing on its chair.
Robert went up and tapped the microphone, which squealed, and everybody groaned. He got about three sentences into his toast before he had to stop. He held up the necklace instead, and the stone turned in the candlelight, and he said into the microphone, “This was borrowed. From my brother. I’m sorry it took so long to bring it back.”
Nobody in the room knew what he meant except three people.
Martha sat in the front row. She had to move Lisa’s purse to do it.
He came down the aisle between the folding chairs and stood behind her. She felt his knuckles brush the back of her neck, felt him fight the little clasp, heard him say come on, come on under his breath. Eleanor was standing next to him in her ruined lace sleeve, laughing at him.
It caught on the fourth try.
The stone was cold for a second against her collarbone. And then it wasn’t.
—
Would you have forgiven Robert right there in that kitchen? I keep going back and forth.
Wedding-day tensions and unexpected turns unfold in a bride’s clash with a church janitor, a grandfather’s words when the groom disappears, and a judge’s surprising response to a bride’s guest.
