Gwen E. Kirby
When Jenny was nineteen, her married Spanish professor told her they would fly so far away, she’d never find her way back. “You promise?” she asked, and he kissed her neck. But kisses weren’t promises and instead of going to Madrid, he took her to the Motel 8 one town over. After one semester, he gave her a silver necklace with a small diamond pendant. In return, she changed her major to English.
What daughter would want a necklace with that story, a mistress’s bauble, a whore’s bribe? So when she showed the necklace to her young daughter Sara, she said it was an heirloom, an eighteenth birthday present to Jenny’s mother from a wealthy great aunt. Jenny’s mother was dead from cancer and couldn’t expose her lie, couldn’t ask her in that smoker’s rasp what exactly she was playing at.
Her mother never had much use for the past. When Jenny was ten, she asked her about their family tree. It was an assignment for school. Her mom had sighed and kept on chopping a head of iceberg lettuce. “Your grandfather was an asshole who worked at a bank in Grand Rapids. My grandfather never talked and had too many kids.” She punctuated each sentence with the crack of the knife against the cutting board. She did not mention Jenny’s father in Madison, busy with his new job and same problems. “It’s not the fucking Mayflower. It’s the same people and same shit.”
Later in her room, Jenny made up a family tree that went back to the secret bastard child of Elizabeth I, smuggled from the palace and sent to Venice to be raised by an order of nuns whose tongues were cut out so they could never tell tales. On a poster board, she taped a photo of Maria from The Sound of Music.
Her teacher made her redo the assignment. Made her stand in front of her fifth-grade class and admit she was a liar descended of an asshole and a fornicator. Or, as she put it, “My family has always lived in Michigan.”
***
And now, when she wanted to feel the diamond in her palm and warm it with her hand (Leaves a bit of your soul behind, her grandma always said, as if people had bits of soul to spare)? Now when she wanted to check that the clasp was strong, pull on the chains to make sure they wouldn’t break, now with Sara’s eighteenth birthday in a few weeks? It wasn’t in her jewelry box.
There were only two suspects: Sara and Jenny’s husband Jake. Sara was studying at a friend’s house. Or, maybe, on a secret date, the necklace around her pale neck, sparkling below acne scars? Her serious daughter rarely lied, but if she wanted to impress a boy, Jenny understood. Jenny had tried to impress the Spanish professor with her perfect use of the preterite and her smile as he dumped her, as if she were impossible to hurt. “You’re so young,” he’d said, caressing the side of her face, the diamond above her breasts. “Soon you won’t even remember me.” She’d had sex with him one last time and thought that she couldn’t even call herself a homewrecker. Nothing so powerful or destructive, lying on her back.
Jenny passed from the bedroom past the living room, where Jake was on the couch playing Fortnight. When he noticed her, he smiled absently. “You getting a snack?” he asked, which meant that he would like a snack. On the fridge in the kitchen, a magnet said, “It’s wine o’clock!” Jenny popped an edible.
Jake knew the necklace wasn’t an heirloom. She hadn’t asked his permission when she’d invented the story and he hadn’t stopped her, but he didn’t like it. It would be like him to hide the necklace—he hated arguing, would rather not engage than ever back down—and she pictured the necklace in a drawer in his office, coiled in an empty Altoid tin, reeking of mint and guilt. If Jake had it, he’d confess in a few years. That was one difference between them. She’d told him she didn’t want a diamond engagement ring and he’d assumed it was because of the Spanish professor. The truth was, she loved diamonds, but better the vintage ring they could afford, the courthouse wedding. And now that they could buy a diamond if she asked? She would keep the pearl ring.
What did it matter if something was real? She sat at the kitchen table as the edible softened the edges of the evening, the long June sun fading away. Her countertops were fake granite, pockmarked from a thousand cuts. Her hardwood floors were laminate. Her left breast was a pad in her bra, a preemptive strike against her mother’s cancer; it hadn’t been the cigarettes that got her after all. All real enough.
She took down a cereal bowl for Jake and poured out the rest of a bag of chips.
The third suspect: herself. At the end-of-year teacher party, she’d worn the necklace with a red dress, then thrown the dress into the hamper even though the dress was dry clean only. Every time she’d done the laundry since she’d emptied the basket and left the dress at the bottom, a problem for later.
She dropped the bowl of chips off, kissed her husband’s hair. Went into her jewelry box again and rifled through mismatched earrings and tangled chains. She emptied the laundry basket until only the dress was there, the necklace surely caught in its folds. But she didn’t pick the dress up and shake it out to see. The urge to hold the necklace had passed, leaving only the hope that her daughter really was wearing it, that it already belonged to someone else, someone who could love it, who could tell a story about it that was gloriously free from the truth and, as the years went on, less and less of a lie.
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Gwen E. Kirby is the author of the debut collection Shit Cassandra Saw. Her stories appear in One Story, Guernica, Tin House, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati.