Oops, Wrong Bride? Fine. No Wedding. novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Last Step

I didn't answer Shelby.

I just walked out of that dining room on Hayes's arm and left her smoothing her white leather.

On Monday I took my mother's pearls across Tradd Street in a jam jar.

All seventy-nine of them, rattling.

The pink house was even smaller inside than I remembered.

Shelby's mother looked at the jar, and then at me.

"I can restring those," she said. "Silk, knotted between. The way they were."

"That's why I came."

"No, it isn't."

She cleared a chair for me and sat down at her machine.

"Your mother knew," she said.

The room went very still.

"When?"

"Shelby was two. She had a fever, and I couldn't pay the doctor, and Gene wouldn't come." She lined up three pearls. "Your mother came instead. She'd figured it out from the chin."

"She came here."

"With a pound cake and her checkbook. She paid that doctor. Then she paid for Shelby's dance lessons. Twelve years of them. Her braces. Her prom dress, which I sewed, and your mother bought the satin."

I couldn't feel my hands.

"She never said a word to me."

"She didn't want you to have a sister you'd have to share your father with." Shelby's mother finally looked up. "She thought you'd lose him. She didn't know you never had him."

I thought of the pantry door, shut every September.

"And she never hated you?"

"Not once. I wish she had. It would've been easier to stand."

She threaded the first pearl.

"There's one more thing. When she was dying, she called me to the hospital. Me and Gene, in the same room."

"Why?"

"So I'd hear him promise." She tied a tiny knot. "Sweetgrass goes to Liza. The house goes to Liza. The pearls go to Liza. He said yes, he promised, and he cried."

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