Chapter 1 - The Necklace Came Off First
Teresa slapped my hand away before I even touched the necklace.
“Daughters-in-law don’t get gifts,” she said loudly enough for all twelve relatives around the birthday table to hear. “You give me your money, clean my house, and thank God my son still tolerates you.”
For seven months, I had transferred three thousand dollars into her checking account on the first Friday of every month.
For seven months, I had spent most Saturdays driving from downtown Chicago to her house in Park Ridge to scrub bathrooms, mop hardwood, change sheets, clean the refrigerator, and prepare meals she froze for the week.
Daniel called it helping family.
Teresa called it what a good wife did.
That night, at her sixty-third birthday dinner in our apartment, she was wearing the four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gold necklace I had bought her.
I reached for the clasp.
She caught my forearm and shoved me backward into a dining chair.
Something in me finally hardened.
I tore free, stepped behind her, unclasped the necklace, and pulled it from her neck.
Daniel grabbed my shoulder.
“Clara.”
I twisted away.
His elbow struck the leather work folder hanging over the chair beside him.
The folder hit the floor.
Receipts scattered across the hardwood.
Teresa’s face changed instantly.
Daniel put his shoe over the papers.
“Put Mom’s necklace back on and keep your filthy hands off my papers before I remind you who pays the price when you embarrass this family.”
I crouched.
He reached down.
I knocked his hand aside and pulled the first receipt from beneath his shoe.
TRANSFER — $3,000.
Teresa Pierce.
Four years earlier.
I grabbed another.
Three thousand.
Another.
Three thousand.
Same day of the month.
Same amount I had been sending since our wedding.
“You were giving her three thousand a month years before we married,” I said.
Daniel stopped trying to take the receipts.
Teresa did not.
She lunged across the table.
I blocked her arm.
“Daniel, you idiot,” she snapped. “I told you to destroy everything before she discovered what we bought with her money!”
Nobody around the table moved.
I dumped the rest of the folder onto the table.
A small envelope slid beneath my handbag and tore open.
A brass apartment key skidded against a dessert fork.
Then a folded photograph landed beside it.
Daniel stood in the loading area beneath our condominium building.
He was handing Teresa an identical key.
I looked at him.
“That’s my apartment.”
He went white.
Teresa reached for the photograph.
May you like
I put my hand over it first.
And suddenly the three thousand dollars was no longer the worst thing lying on my table.
