I turned to greet Beverly, who was quite the opposite of what I'd expected. I'd pictured round and jolly, but she was rail thin and nearly as tall as Eamon. She carried herself with a hunch, like she’d spent her life trying to keep people from noticing her height. “I’m so happy to meet you. This is my boyfriend, Eamon.”
“Fiancé, actually. Katherine doesn't like to talk about it.” Eamon had decided that he was going to start referring to us as engaged, even though we weren't.
Beverly looked him up and down and then shot me a pointed glance. “How are you not shouting about him from the rooftops?”
“It's not an official engagement.”
“I’ve just asked her to marry me a few times.”
Beverly laughed quietly and shook her head. “It’s none of my business, but you might want to get this worked out, you two.”
I’m trying.
“So what can I help you with today? Come to see Ms. Marjorie? Is this about the necklace?”
“Yes. My sister gets married on Saturday.” The weight of it hit me hard. This was likely my only real shot at saving my relationship with my sister. “I had to try one last time, and she won’t take my calls so I figured it would be best in person. I worried that if I called ahead of time, she'd just tell them not to let me in the front door.”
“An ambush. I like it,” Beverly said. “You must love your sister very much to endure a direct hit from Hurricane Marjorie. I hate to tell you this, but she's a Category 4 today.”
I looked at Eamon, who actually appeared concerned. That made me feel one hundred times worse.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
“They ran out of biscuits at breakfast. Believe me, it doesn't take much to set her off.” Beverly's eyes softened and she put her hand on my shoulder. “But all we can do is try. Come on. Let's see what we can do about getting that necklace.”
Hand in hand, Eamon and I followed Beverly through a maze of halls. Every resident and worker we encountered greeted her. She seemed to be very popular. She stopped outside room 204. “I’ll go in first, but I'll leave the door open so you can hear what’s going on. I'll call for you when the moment seems right.”
My heart felt as though it was going to stage a coup against the rest of my body, but Eamon squeezed my hand again and that helped my pulse settle.
“Hello, Marjorie,” Beverly said from the other room. “I have a surprise for you. You have some visitors.”
“If it's my daughter, you can tell her to go away unless she's brought my suitcase and is packing me up to go home.”
Eamon and I looked at each other, half horrified, half stuck in this uncomfortable moment where my highly unreasonable grandmother held my fate in her hands.
“No. It's your granddaughter, Katherine. And her fiancé.”
“Even Beverly calls me your fiancé,” Eamon whispered into my ear.
“She's here to steal my Jennifer's things.”
“No. No. That's not it at all. Your other granddaughter is about to get married. A girl needs something of her mother's when she gets married. Doesn't she?”
“In any normal family, yes. But our family is not normal.”
I suddenly felt the closest I'd felt to Grandma Price in a very long time. She was so right. And I couldn't let Beverly continue to argue with her. I had to take the reins. If an old lady threw me out of a nursing home, it couldn't be any worse than anything else that had ever happened to me.
With a nod, I let Eamon know that I was going in, but I only got a pace or two into the room before I came to a stop. The far wall was covered in photographs of my mother.
Eamon grabbed my arm from behind. “Katherine. Youdolook just like her.” He stepped next to me, his eyes drawn to what was essentially a shrine to my mom.
“Hi, Grandma.” She was perched on a small ice blue love seat, wearing the old lady version of a velour tracksuit in fuchsia pink. Every day of the twenty-plus years we hadn’t seen each other was evident—wrinkles deeper, eyes sunken, and a full head of white hair. It was difficult to look at her when it felt as though my mother was peering over my shoulder from the pictures on the wall.
“My God. Katherine.” Her voice made it sound like I was a ghost. Her eyes raked over me. I'd forgotten how difficult it was to fall under her appraisal. I was already flinching and wanting to shrink away.
But I had to stand up to her. I stepped closer, trying to focus on her and not the pictures I was both afraid of and eager to see, images I hadn’t seen since before my mother died. My grandmother scrutinized me with a narrow stare, but it wasn't her usual mean-spirited sneer. Perhaps that had been a childhood construct, something I'd built in my own head to explain the cruel things she'd said to me over the years.
“Grandma, this is my fiancé, Eamon. He's from Ireland.”
