My Latest Grievance Read Online Free PDF Page B

north-facing guest room had a mattress that sagged in the middle. How did she feel about that?
    "I'm told I snore."
    I said, "I'm told I sleep like the dead."
    My room was immaculate. I had turned down the corners of each quilt in what I hoped was an inviting and professional-chambermaid fashion. The stuffed animals of my youth had been banished to my closet, except for the pair that had been gifts from her. The centerpiece, though, was my dresser. On its waist-high surface was an artistic arrangement of my colognes, my two lipsticks, my hairbrush and comb, my leatherette manicure set, and—as if that's where one kept one's precious jewels—my pearls, coiled concentrically, their clasp and its sapphire ready for inspection.
    "How pretty," she said, looking everywhere but the bureau. "Is this yellow a new paint job?"
    "Relatively new."
    "What was here before?"
    "Beige." My gaze wandered, helpfully, meaningfully, to the bureau and my precise arrangement of pearls.
    "What are you looking at?" my grandmother asked.
    She wasn't focusing, which meant I had to abandon subtlety. "This necklace? Does it look familiar?" I asked.
    She finally put her suitcase down and came closer. Before she could answer, I confided, "Daddy's first wife sent them to me as a birthday present, completely out of the blue."
    She answered rather casually, "Did she say why?"
    I explained that I was the daughter that Laura Lee never had due to the untimely divorce, which apparently was not her idea. "But you know a lot more about her than I do," I prompted.
    My grandmother picked up the necklace and did what seemed an astonishing thing to me—she put her mouth around a pearl and nibbled it.
    "Hey!"
    "They're real," she said. "I was wondering if she sent you a knock-off."
    "You know they're real from biting into one?"
    "Here," she said. "Real pearls have a gritty quality. Try it. Picture the grain of sand that started it all."
    "No, thanks," I said. "Besides, even if they were a fake, it would have been incredibly nice of her to go to the trouble to make a copy, don't you think?"
    "It's got me worried," said my grandmother. "I don't think she'd give them away to the daughter of ... let's just say 'her successor.'"
    "The other woman," I added.
    "How much have they told you?"
    I said I knew the big picture but not the small.
    My grandmother said, "I hope you don't keep your valuables lying on the bureau collecting dust."
    I said no, absolutely not.
    "And never wear perfume with pearls. The alcohol isn't good for them."
    I swore that I would never wear perfume with pearls. What about toilet water? What about hairspray?
    "You're too young for hairspray," she said.
    I needed to steer the conversation away from the care and storage of my necklace to its former owner and to my mother the homewrecker. "Mom made me mail it back, but then Laura Lee sent it all over again. She wouldn't take no for an answer."
    "It's odd," said my grandmother. "But then again, Laura Lee was always something of a free spirit. I'm just a little worried that something's wrong and she's bequeathing these to you."
    "Dad was worried, too..." I stopped there, sparing her the theory that Patsy Leonard and I had embraced—that Laura Lee was forever young and immortal in her ex-husband's wistful heart.
    "They were my mother's," she said. "Your great-grandmother Paulette's. I gave them to David to give to Laura Lee as a wedding present. She must have passed them on to you because she felt they should stay within our family. I find that very honorable. Some people might have sold them under the same circumstances."
    I asked if she and Laura Lee had been in touch lately.
    "Christmas cards," said my grandmother. "And birthday cards, one-sided, from her to me. She's surprisingly good at remembering dates."
    "But you don't send her a birthday card back?"
    My grandmother pursed, then unpursed, her lips. "Your father asked me not to."
    "Even though she's your relative?"
    "It has to do with everyone