“Perhaps he thought to save you the work,” Kate said. “I hope I don’t upset you when I say that, from what I understand, Harold knew he didn’t have much time left.”
“I’m not at all upset, Grandma Kate. I did have that same thought. I hope it was that. I hope it was an act of looking forward and not one of trashing the past.” Since she didn’t like the way that last thought felt, Michaela shut the thought down and focused on her very welcome if unexpected guest. “Would you like some coffee, Grandma Kate? Or tea?”
“Coffee sounds good, Michaela. Thank you.”
There were still some of those wonderful pecan cookies that Anna Jessop had sent, so Michaela put some on a plate and brought them, with the coffee, to the dining room table.
“Thank you, Michaela.” She picked up one of the cookies. “Our Anna is such a wonderful baker, isn’t she?”
“I love her cookies and her banana bread. But Aunt Bernice has a hand with yeast bread that seriously puts eating it, warmed and covered with butter, into an entirely new realm of gastronomic delight.”
Grandma Kate chuckled. “She does, indeed. I never had much talent when it came to baking or cooking, for that matter. I was a competent cook, but not a talented one. The best meals our children ate, growing up, happened when either Gerald or Patrick manned the stove.”
“That’s not one of my great talents, either,” Michaela said.
Kate looked over at the boxes that Lewis and Randy had placed on the table and read off the labels aloud. “Let’s see, you have Farm Business, Family Papers, Mable’s Recipes, and Daniel.” She met Michaela’s gaze. “Daniel was your brother, wasn’t he? A hero who gave his life in service to our country.”
“Yes, he was. Ten years ago.” She looked down at the box. “I didn’t even know dad kept anything of his.”
“Well, then, it was a nice surprise to find he had, wasn’t it?”
Michaela grinned. “It was!” She sighed. “My brother’s death changed everything. I thought about it, just recently, the way it was after he died. Looking back, it was as if Daniel was the glue that held our family together. And when he died…it all just kind of crumbled. Especially for my dad.”
“It’s hard to lose a child,” Kate said. “Even if that child is an adult fully grown. My sons are all senior citizens now, and yet, they’re still my babies. Our daughter, Maria…she was a woman fully grown, with a son who was technically an adult and a young daughter. Yet she was my baby girl, my only daughter. When she died in that plane crash—and our granddaughter, Amy, with her—oh, that was a hard, hard thing. So painful to bear and so very difficult to see any kind of future at all, at first.”
“I hope to have children one day. Even just thinking about that, I can’t imagine it.”
“I don’t think it really does any good to do that—to imagine it before it happens. Because until it does, you don’t truly know how you’ll react.”
“You’re right, of course.”
“Now having said that, I can say that while Maria was the only daughter of my blood, I still had children and grandchildren who needed me. I had husbands, then, who really needed me. We grieved, the three of us, together. And we loved the children we had left—though they were grown—all the more because of our loss. That part seems a tough thing to do for a lot of people, but it’s how you survive the hole in your heart that never mends.”
“Mom tried, but Dad… He became a bit bitter, a real curmudgeon. I think he just felt the loss of his only son too deeply.”
“Yes. I think so too. Will you open Daniel’s box today?”
“No. I thought, actually, I’d begin with that trunk. Because it had no label, so I don’t have a clue what’s in it.” Michaela tilted her head. “Would you like to help me explore it?”
“I think I would!”
Michaela unlatched and then lifted the lid of the trunk. The faintest scent of lavender wafted out.
“The first time we took a trip to England,” Grandma Kate said, “was in the early 1950s. We traveled via ocean liner. In those days, trunks such as this one made up your luggage.”
“Very different from the easy-to-wheel suitcases of today.”
“Indeed.”
Tissue paper covered the contents. Michaela carefully gathered that covering layer and placed it on the opened lid then looked down.
“Oh!” Michaela reached in and carefully picked up the gown, once white but now with the yellowish tinge of age. “I didn’t know this was here.”
“Your mother’s wedding dress?”
“Yes. She showed it to me once, oh, I must have been maybe ten or eleven. I was still at the age of playing ‘wedding’ with my dolls.” Michaela hadn’t thought about that in years. She stood and held the dress up. Her mother had been a bit taller than she was and a bit larger, besides.
“There’s a dry cleaner in Waco that specializes in wedding gown restoration and preservation.”
“I’ll have to take it there. I think I’ll do that on Monday, before work.” She met Kate’s grin with one of her own. “You never know. I just might have need of it one day.”
“And if you don’t, it’s still something of your mother’s, isn’t it? Perhaps something that might interest a future daughter.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There were other garments inside the trunk as well, items that she recalled as soon as she saw them. There were a couple of dresses that Mabel Powell wore to church on Sundays and the black one she’d only worn once—to her son’s funeral. There were a few sweaters Michaela recalled her mother wearing. And folded as precisely as
