The locket was not worth much. That is what I told myself while I drove to the antique mall in Russellville with it wrapped in a dirty Kleenex from my glove box. The chain was kinked so bad you couldn’t pull it over your head without pinching skin, and the clasp stuck halfway every time you tried to snap it shut. One tiny dent sat right near the hinge from the afternoon in 1979 when I threw it across a pine dresser and then cried for two hours because I had no right to be angry at metal.
Inside were the initials E.M. and T.R. Ellen Marie and Thomas Ray. Not mine. I was 68 years old and cleaning out my sewing room because my daughter, Jolene, kept nagging me that I needed less stuff around in case I fell and couldn’t get up. Thread spools, yellowed buttons, church Christmas programs from thirty years back, and that blue Danish cookie tin sitting at the very bottom of the closet. I should have thrown it in the Arkansas River forty years ago when the weather was turning cold and everything in my life was coming apart at the seams. Instead, I kept it in the dark, because people always think guilt makes you confess when sometimes it just makes you hoard evidence.
The antique buyer’s name was Ben Calder, though everyone around Yell County just called him Ben. He had those wire-rim magnifying glasses shoved up on his forehead like a second pair of eyebrows and a battery-operated radio sitting on a stack of old National Geographics playing Conway Twitty songs at a low hiss.
The shop smelled like cedar dust, paraffin wax, and somebody’s leftover fried chicken grease from the diner down the block.
He turned the locket over twice in his rough fingers, squinted at the latch, and offered me $42. I said fine too fast. My hand was already reaching out to take the crinkled bills before he even pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Then he popped the heart open with his thumbnail to check the stamp inside. His thumb stopped dead on the scratched initials.
“Where did you get Ellen’s necklace?” he asked.
My knees didn’t buckle. I hate when writers in books say their characters’ knees buckle like wet cardboard because real panic just makes you stiff and polite. I simply sat down on an old piano bench that had a faded red velvet cushion and put my purse squarely in my lap like I was sitting in the dentist’s waiting room.
I asked, “Who is Ellen?”
Ben looked at me over the top of his magnifiers, and his eyes weren’t friendly anymore. “Ellen Morris. She was engaged to Tommy Ray Boone back in the spring of 1979. He bought this exact piece right out of my daddy’s glass case before everything went sideways.”
Tommy Ray. I hadn’t heard his full name spoken out loud since Ronald Reagan was running for his first term. I married Tommy in a courthouse in Faulkner County when I was 19 and he was 22, except the marriage didn’t even last long enough for us to get the wedding proofs back from the local studio. Everyone in Conway County knew he had loved Ellen first, and everyone knew Ellen packed up her Plymouth and left town so fast after the county fair that the dust didn’t settle for a week. They knew the clean version of the story. The version I helped write and glue together with my own silence.
I looked right at Ben and told him the lie I had rehearsed for decades without ever knowing I was practicing. I told him I found it in a cardboard box from an estate sale down in Morrilton. My voice sounded entirely normal, steady and flat, which scared me worse than if I had started howling right there among the iron skillets and old quilts.
Ben didn’t believe a word of it. He reached under the counter, pulled out a thick black ledger with oil stains on the corners, and flipped straight to a page covered in phone numbers and names written in pencil. On the top line, clear as day, was Thomas R. Boone, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Beside it, in his daddy’s old handwriting: Still searching for E.M. locket.
My mouth went dry, like I’d been eating salt crackers in the sun. “Is Tommy alive?” I asked.
Ben didn’t answer right away. He studied my face, and I could tell by the way his jaw tightened that he saw right through my Sunday-morning manners. “He was in here last month,” Ben said, leaning his forearms on the glass counter. “Came in with his grandson. Talked about her for twenty minutes like she just walked out of the room.”
I stood up, snatched the $42 off the counter, and told him I had to go before I even realized my purse was still zipped. I drove all the way back home with the locket tucked down inside the zippered pocket of my handbag because Ben refused to buy it after that, muttering that some things weren’t just merchandise to be flipped for a profit. The highway asphalt looked gray and greasy under the afternoon sun, and my hands on the steering wheel were shaking so bad I had to pull over by the grain silos for three minutes just to stop crying.
At 3:05, I sat at my laminate kitchen table and dialed Jolene’s cell phone number. She answered on the fourth ring, her voice tight and hushed because she was sitting at her desk at the insurance office where people yelled at her about water damage all day.
“Mom, I’m in the middle of a quote right now,” she said, pencil tapping against her blotter. “Is everything alright? Did you fall again?”
I looked down at the blue Danish tin sitting right beside the butter dish, empty except for a few stray paper clips and a button off my mother’s winter coat. I thought about Tommy Ray in Tulsa with his grandson, looking for something he lost forty years ago because I told him a story that kept him away.
“Honey,” I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle, the way I always knew it would when the bill finally came due. “If a man named Thomas Boone ever calls your office, do not hang up on him.”
She went quiet on the other end, the pencil tapping stopping all at once. “Why would some man named Boone be calling me at work?”
I reached out and touched the dented gold metal sitting there on the wood, the only thing I had left that belonged to a girl who disappeared when the county fair came to town.
“Because,” I told her, and the kitchen was so still I could hear the refrigerator hum in the corner. “I lied about what happened before you were born.”
