Chapter 2 — WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER
Her name was Tess Marchetti and she ran the flower cart.
She was twenty-eight.
She came over fast when she saw a woman in a suit talking to her daughter, with the particular walk of someone who has been in trouble for that before, and she said, "Junie. What did I say."
Junie said, "She has the ring."
Tess looked at my hand.
She did not say anything for what felt like a considerable amount of time and then she pushed the sleeve of her sweater back and turned her own hand over, and there it was.
Gold, a rose, a deep red stone.
Not similar.
The same.
Not the same design from the same era, the way two Victorian mourning rings can look alike across a case at an antiques fair — the same object, down to the two small leaves at the base of the shank where the gold has been worn thin by a lifetime of a thumb going over it.
Mine has that wear.
Hers has that wear.
I said, "May I ask where you got that?"
She said, "It was my grandmother's."
And I said — and this is the sentence I would give a good deal to take back, though not for the reason you would think — I said, "So was mine."
Tess Marchetti looked at me then in a way I had not been looked at in a long time.
Not hostile.
Assessing.
She said, "What's your name?"
I said, "Adele Rosewood."
She had a rose in her hand and she put it back in the basket very carefully, the way you put down something you have decided not to buy.
She said, "That's my grandmother's name."
I said, "It's mine."
She said, "No. Elena Rosewood. Born 1951. Died 2016."
And she said it the way you say a thing you have said to a great many offices and counters and telephone queues, in the flat complete format of a person who has spent years being asked to prove something.
I gave her my card.
She looked at it for a long moment — my name, the firm's name, which is also my name, twice on one small rectangle of paper — and she put it in her apron pocket and she said, "I'm not looking for anything."
I said, "I know."
She said, "People always think we are."