The next thing she had decided to do was to go through her mother’s things. She doubted whether her mother would have left a will, but she wanted to make sure. Amber needed to know the details of her mother’s finances anyway. The undertaker had told her that the State would pay for the funeral as her mother was registered as unemployed but then there were all the other expenses to think of such as the wake and the running of the house.
The obvious place for Amber to start was in her mother’s bedroom. It was the place where Loretta kept all her private things. She went through her mother’s wardrobe and chest of drawers first. The wardrobe was a triple one and was packed tight with clothing. At first Amber was confused as she didn’t recall her mother having so many clothes but, when she started searching through it, she realised that about half of the outfits were things she no longer wore.
She pulled out a red mini dress and was instantly swept back in time. She remembered her mother wearing it a few times when she went out on dates with Dale. There were also a few tops and a couple of short skirts she recalled her mother wearing years ago when she was dressed up for a date or a night on the town. Others she didn’t recognise but she could tell they were old.
Rummaging through her mother’s wardrobe was a bit like going through a time warp. Amber felt a sense of sadness on seeing how many of her old outfits her mother had held on to and it seemed that they probably had a special emotional significance for her.
Next, she reached up to the top shelf of her mother’s wardrobe where she could see a white box. She wondered if it might contain some of her mother’s paperwork and she pulled it out. Amber laid the box down on the bed. It was yellowing around the edges and she carefully lifted off the lid, nervous of it disintegrating if she pulled too hard. Inside she could see folds of white material: satin, lace and chiffon. She guessed right away what it was, but she couldn’t resist taking it out of the box and holding it against herself.
The wedding dress was in an old-fashioned eighties style with puffed sleeves and a full skirt. It was cut low at the front in a sweetheart neckline and Amber couldn’t resist a smile, thinking about how her mother would have pulled out all the stops to wow everybody on her wedding day. The dress was now an off-white colour, and Amber wondered how often her mother would have taken the dress out of the box to admire it.
She couldn’t help but feel as though she was intruding on her mother’s former happiness and, feeling remorseful, she folded the dress carefully into the box. Before she put it back inside the wardrobe, she pulled out another box that had been sitting underneath it and took the lid off that too. The breath caught in her throat when she realised it was her parents’ wedding album.
Amber sat on the bed with the album beside her, feeling a mix of excitement and sorrow. She could remember her mother showing her photographs of her father in the days before she started seeing Dale. One time she had seen tears in her mother’s eyes, but Loretta had brushed it off and said it was just irritation because of the dust from the old album. But then she had stopped bringing the photos out, and Amber couldn’t ever remember a time when she had shown her the wedding photos. Perhaps that had been too painful for her.
She gently opened the album. It felt surreal to see her mother staring back at her while standing beside the father Amber had never known. She could see now that Nathan bore a striking resemblance to him. Her parents seemed so happy together and her mother looked stunning in the wedding dress, back in a time when the material was still gleaming white. Amber spotted her grandparents too, looking young, and a couple of aunties and uncles she still recognised. But the rest of the people in the photographs were strangers to her.
She wiped a tear from her eye and put both boxes neatly back inside the wardrobe before venturing underneath the bed. Amber took out a large box and opened it. She was greeted by the sweet, musky smell of old paper. This seemed a likely place to find all the important documents.
Amber worked her way through birthday cards from her father and Dale, photographs of her mother and father and another picture of her mother, Dale, Nathan and herself as a child, on a day out to the seaside. She remembered the day well; it was one of her best childhood memories.
There were also some cinema tickets and a party invitation all dated around the same time. Amber realised with sadness that it would have been around the period when her mother had been seeing Dale.
But the item that upset her the most was a love letter from her father. It was folded up and worn at the corners and it struck Amber that it must have been opened and read over many times. She knew she shouldn’t really intrude on her parents’ private lives even though they were no longer with her, but she was overcome by curiosity, so she opened it up and read the contents.
My darling Loretta,
I just had to drop you
