The carpet fibers under the back seat of Raymond’s twelve-year-old sedan were caked with crushed peppermint candies and gray road dust from five winters of farm roads, but my fingers hit something cold and hard right near the seat track. I pulled it out, wiping the lint off on the knee of my old corduroys. It was a heavy, old-fashioned gold earring, the kind with a screw-back closure that nobody under sixty wears anymore, shaped like a twisted oak leaf with a tiny chip of flawed diamond caught in the vein.
It didn’t belong to me, and it certainly didn’t belong in the car Raymond had promised to trade in for something more reliable before the transmission finally gave out on Route 51. I didn’t say a word about it when he came out to the garage with a can of WD-40, and I didn’t say anything when I dropped it into the small pocket of my cardigan. I just reached for the damp rag and kept wiping down the dashboard, my mind turning over the small, quiet inconsistencies that had been piling up in our house for the past three years.
By late afternoon, the house smelled faintly of roasted garlic and the rosemary I had clipped from the back porch before the frost got it. I had called Clara around noon, inviting her over for pot roast with a casualness I didn’t feel, telling her Raymond was busy clearing out the garage and we needed to eat before it got dark.
She arrived right at five-thirty, her heavy wool coat buttoned to her chin despite the mild evening, her gray hair pinned up with the severe neatness she had maintained since Raymond’s father died twenty years ago. She stepped through the back door, and I saw it immediately before she even unbuttoned her collar. Her left earlobe carried the heavy, twisted gold leaf. Her right earlobe was entirely bare. She didn’t look around the room the way she usually did to inspect my dusting; she just walked straight to the table, her hand drifting once to touch her left ear with a nervous, practiced little motion that made my stomach tighten into a hard knot.
