What We Keep

Arthur sat in his leather armchair, the same one his father had purchased in 1962, watching seven-year-old Lily scribble at the kitchen table. She was making a family tree for school, her tongue sticking out in that same way her grandmother's used to.

"Grandpa, what was Great-Grandpa like?" she asked, looking up with those wide, curious eyes.

Arthur smiled, leaning back. "Oh, he was stubborn as an old bull. Had a farm out past Lancaster, and there was this prize-winning bull—Big Ben—that he refused to sell even when the neighbors offered twice what he'd paid. Said some things weren't meant to have a price tag on them."

He paused, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a small silver locket. Inside was a single curl of dark hair, delicate as a spider's thread, tied with a faded blue ribbon. "This is from your grandmother, the day we first met. She was barely nineteen, hair down to her waist, laughing at something I'd said that wasn't even particularly funny."

Lily took the locket carefully, turning it over in her small hands. "You kept it all these years?"

"Some things," Arthur said softly, "you hold onto because they remind you of what matters. Not because they're worth money, but because they're worth remembering."

She thought about this for a moment. "Like Goldie?"

Arthur's heart gave a little pinch. Goldie, the goldfish she'd won at the fair last spring, had been found floating at the top of its bowl just yesterday. He'd helped her bury it beneath the rosebushes.

"Exactly like Goldie," he said. "She wasn't with us long, but she taught you how to take care of something smaller than yourself. That's worth something."

Lily nodded, setting the locket gently on the table. She went back to her drawing, and Arthur watched her in the afternoon light, thinking about how quickly time moved—how his father was gone, how his beloved Marie had been gone ten years now, how someday he too would be nothing more than a story someone told.

But not yet. Not yet.

"Would you like me to tell you about the day Big Ben broke through the fence and ended up at the neighbors' porch?" he asked.

Lily's head snapped up, grinning. "Was Great-Grandpa mad?"

"Oh, furious," Arthur said, and began the story he'd told a dozen times before, because some things, like love and family and good stories, were worth keeping.