are also stiff, and we leave the back open. The chest is tight, and the long lace sleeves are snug on my arms and scratchy against my skin. I run a hand over tiny beads and pearls sewn into the sweetheart neckline and wonder how Grandmother felt in this dress. Happy, excited, scared? Was she madly in love with Louis Jackson? Did she want to run into his arms as he waited for her at the altar?
Mom used to have a black-and-white photograph of Louis in his uniform, but I don’t remember exactly what his face looked like. Other than his war hero status, Mom has never really talked about her dad. He left when she was four and died when she was seven, so she never knew him. Grandmother never talked about him either, and I don’t know if that was out of respect for Papa Bob or because she’d moved on and forgotten him. Everyone has forgotten. I don’t even know where he’s buried. It’s sad, like he never lived at all.
“I think I found that dress in this photo album,” Lindsey says, and brings it to me. She places it on top of the trunk, and it’s open to an eight-by-ten photograph taken in a flower garden. Grandmother Lily’s floral bouquet is so big it looks like a funeral spray. She’s wearing a simple headpiece and a long veil, and if I look close enough, I can see the same lace sleeves and sweetheart neckline. The wedding party is small, with only two family members on each side, and most of them look happy. Gone was the era of dour-faced photographs. Too bad someone didn’t tell the groomsmen that their joyless expressions were twenty years out of fashion.
I zero in on the man standing next to Grandmother, wearing a dark suit and tie, a white shirt, and a very dapper pocket square. He’s old-school handsome, and his hair is slicked back from a nasty widow’s peak.
My nasty widow’s peak. The one I had lasered off. The one that still grows an occasional stray hair from my forehead. I never knew my dad or grandfather, and for the first time in my life, I’m staring at a male with the same DNA as me.
I show the picture to Mom, and she looks back and forth from the picture to me. “That’s Momma and Grandmere and Grandpere.” She points to the groom. “That’s my daddy.” She moves her finger. “Jasper and Jed.”
“Where’s Grandfather’s family?”
She shrugs. “Momma didn’t know them.”
Which I’ve always thought was strange, but I seem to be the only one. “Why are they on the groom’s side?”
“School friends.”
This time she doesn’t lower her voice or look around when she says, “Jed and Jasper were gay as a box of sprinkles.” Mom shakes her head, and the broken feather falls and hangs off one side. “Momma said Daddy’s kin didn’t want him to get married.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She digs in a small compartment of the trunk and pulls out earrings, heavy with clusters of rubies and emeralds.
I return my attention to the photograph. My great-grandparents look pleased, Lily and Louis smile pleasantly, but Jasper and Jed look like they’re headed to a memorial service instead of their sister’s wedding.
Lindsey helps Mom clip on the heavy earrings, which immediately pull at her lobes. “Don’t those hurt?” I ask her. She shakes her head and the earrings swing from side to side.
Lindsey takes out her phone and says, “Let me take a picture of both of you.”
We walk across the hall to the library, where the lighting is far better. Raphael screams from the chandelier overhead like someone’s stabbed him.
“Shut your beak,” I say.
“Merde! Shut the fuck up, Boomer!”
I give him the stink eye I’ve inherited from Mom and slide the doors closed so Lindsey’s fear won’t cause her to go into early labor.
Mom and I pose in front of the fireplace, our faces dour like Jed’s and Jasper’s, and almost all the same portraits lining the hall. We play around on the conversation couch; in one pic she holds her hand out like a traffic cop as if to stop the conversation. Then we move near a floor-to-ceiling window and stand within the variegated sunlight. Then, I trade places with Lindsey and snap her in the light, hand on her belly.
“Cup your bump,” I tell her as she poses in front of the fireplace. “The other day, I saw a tiny T-shirt that said ‘Poop Happens’ on it.” Lindsey