Chapter 10: The Restorer

I stood on the bank steps with the stack of statements in my arms.

"Can I stop it?" I asked. "Before Friday?"

The woman looked back at the doors. Then at me.

"You're a trustee too," she said. "If you dispute the transfers in person, we can freeze the account while it's looked at. Nobody moves a dollar."

"Today?"

"Tomorrow morning. I need my manager."

"I'll be here at nine."

"Ms. Pomeroy." She lowered her voice. "Don't tell her you're coming."

I was there at nine.

I signed my name four times. The manager shook my hand.

At nine twenty, Thursday, June 4, my mother's sixty thousand two hundred and twelve dollars stopped belonging to Larissa.

I walked out into the sun and stood there with my eyes shut.

It was the first thing I'd won since the vows.

It wasn't the money. It was the door closing in her face.

I rode my bike back to Fishtown so fast a bus driver yelled at me.

I sold two hundred dollars of sunflowers before lunch.

At six, I flipped the sign to CLOSED and started stripping roses for a Saturday wedding.

The bell rang.

"We're closed," I said, without looking up.

"I know. I can read."

Wells.

He was carrying a flat white box under one arm, the kind good dresses come in.

He set it on the worktable between the buckets.

"What's that?"

"Yours."

He stepped back from it.

I wiped my hands on my apron.

I lifted the lid.

White tissue paper. A little card that said only "Handle with clean hands."

Under the tissue, my mother's veil.

The silk was smooth again. Every crease was gone.

The two missing pearls were back.

I looked closely, and they weren't new pearls.

They were hers, the same old cream, sewn on with tiny stitches.

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