What We Keep

Margaret sat at her vanity, the same oak table her mother had given her as a wedding gift in 1957. In the silver-backed mirror, she saw her face—a map of seventy-eight years, each line earned through laughter and sorrow, children raised and buried, a husband loved and lost. Her white hair, once chestnut brown and pinned in victory rolls, fell softly around her shoulders. A lock came loose in her brush, and she did what she had done once a month for fifty years: she smoothed it onto a small square of parchment, folded it carefully, and placed it in the silver locket that hung around her neck.

"You're still at that old superstition?" her daughter had asked last week, shaking her head with that gentle condescension the young reserve for their elders. "What on earth do you do with all that hair?"

Margaret had smiled, wisdom teaching her that some things need not be explained to be true. "I'm keeping myself," she'd said simply.

Now her cat, a dusty calico named Clementine who had appeared on her porch three years ago and never left, jumped onto the vanity with a soft thump. Clementine had belonged to Margaret's friend Sarah before Sarah passed—Sarah, who'd kept Margaret sane during the long years of Arthur's decline, who'd brought her casseroles and sat with her in hospital waiting rooms, who'd understood that some griefs are too large for words. Sarah had made Margaret promise to take Clementine, and in doing so, had given her the best sort of companion: one who required nothing but presence, who asked no questions, whose purr could fill the empty rooms of a house that had once held so much noise.

Margaret opened the locket. Inside were locks of hair from every decade of her life: chestnut from her girlhood, a strand from each of her three children as babies, gray from the year Arthur died, and now, this white silk. It was not vanity. It was proof that she had been here, that she had loved and been loved, that she had carried something of everyone she held dear through all the years.

Clementine bumped her forehead against Margaret's hand, and outside the window, the spring garden she and Sarah had planted together bloomed riotously—tulips and daffodils returning, as they always do, as love always does, in unexpected and beautiful ways. Margaret closed the locket with a click, and for a moment, the house felt full again.