I click on it. The sender is Holly Stone, a name I recognize from the neighborhood. It takes a second, but then I place her as a young mom who lives a few blocks over. I feel nauseated when I see the ALL CAPS message, as if Holly is in my dining room, screaming at me. I remember her clearly now. I once witnessed her yelling at some workmen who were replacing the water main on her street. Their digging was preventing her from parking her Yukon directly in front of her house.
Now she is yelling at me across the internet. The back of my skull begins to throb. I don’t need this, not now.
“Caren, can you hear me?” Mara asks.
“Yes, yes, sorry. Can you repeat the question?”
Mara squeezes out a grim smile. “I was asking about the nature of the clients you have now. Corporate? Nonprofit? Private?”
But I’m too swept up in the email to answer.
THAT’S MY BRACELET!!
IT WAS STOLEN LAST YEAR IN A BURGLARY AND I WANT IT BACK!!!!!
Below that is a photograph of a gold bangle with a small gold heart affixed to it.
I close the email, my pulse racing. I recognize the bracelet. It’s one of the pretty gold bangles I posted to the Facebook yard sale page the other night. Apparently, it was stolen. But that’s not what makes my heart pound. It’s how that particular bracelet ended up in the yard sale. I had found it at the bottom of a plastic bag of Rachel’s items destined for Goodwill. Before donating the bag, I decided to search through it in case there might be a few items that would be good for the yard sale. I remember being pleased when I pulled out the bracelet. Quality. Worth something, not a fortune, but certainly yard sale material.
“So I really want to thank you for your time today,” Mara says, her crisp voice slicing through my thoughts.
“What? Oh yes, thank you.”
“We’ll be in touch about the next steps,” she says. “Should there be any.”
The call goes black. There won’t be any next steps. I blew it. Weeks of angling for this interview blown in a few minutes. I had planned to spend Sunday prepping for the interview, but the concussion scuttled that. I’ll deal with the fallout later. Right now, all I can think about is the gold bracelet.
I grab my phone, trembling.
Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe I have things mixed up. I pray this is a misfiring of my brain, a scrambling due to the concussion.
I open my photos app and begin scrolling through the thousands of pictures on my camera roll. One day I plan to cull them, to create organized albums and thematic photo books,but I never seem to find the time. I slow down my scrolling when I get to last December’s photos.
There it is, the one I was thinking of.
A picture of Rachel looking radiant at the Kennedy Center last winter when we went to seeThe Nutcracker, as is our yearly ritual.
She’s smiling, arms crossed in front of her body.
And dangling on my daughter’s wrist is the gold bangle.
THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO
A spring storm had dislodged a large branch from the maple tree in the Allards’ yard, sending it onto Tori’s roof, where it hung precariously like a loose tooth that might fall at any moment.Branchmight be too weak a word, Tori decided. It was more like a limb. At least five feet long, thick and gnarled. And when the wind blew, it swayed, threatening to dive onto her back patio.
It wasn’t safe. Tori knew that much. Autumn had said that she didn’t want to go out in the backyard with Leo until it had been removed. She had made that comment after Tori had done nothing about the dangling limb for a full day.
“Are you going to call your landlord about the branch?” Autumn had asked on Friday when Tori came home from work. “Because it’s really dangerous.”
“Oh, yes,” Tori had lied. “They’re sending someone this weekend.”
“Oh good.” Autumn was clearly relieved. “I was worried you were just like waiting for it to fall.”
After Autumn had left that Friday for the weekend, and her ex had picked up Leo, Tori had curled up in her bathtub with a bottle of wine and cried. She was not a good mother. She didn’t know things that other people knew. She needed a twenty-two-year-old to tell her that she was endangering her own child. The next afternoon, after the rain had died down, Tori put on boots, grabbed a rake, and went out to the backyard to see what she could do.
She was not a handy person. Her ex was just as bad. When they had lived together, it was in a modern luxury building on the edge of Kalorama, a building that had its own doorman, gym, and even a tagline:Where prestige meets panache. Between the two of them they had owned one Phillips-head screwdriver.
Help was only a phone call away. Daniel had come to her rescue a few weeks ago—so why did she hesitate to call him?