The envelope poked out from where Beryl had slotted it among bills paid and unpaid, its top jagged where she had ripped it open. No one wrote letters anymore, especially someone her granddaughter’s age, so why choose this way to express herself? It was a cowardly thing for Louise to have done, and that riled Beryl as much as anything written there.
Beryl lifted the ball of dough from the bowl and kneaded it, folding, pushing, and turning until it was smooth and sprang back from her touch. At first she had tried to work in her studio, but she could not settle herself at the wheel and let the clay rise between her hands. Instead she kept pacing, until at last she picked up the breadmaking bowl, hefted its cool weight, and she knew what she could do. She told herself to ignore the envelope, to look instead at the elastic dough, how it stretched and shone, but all she saw were her hands as they pressed and lifted: spotted and shrunken, veins rising into ridges, just like Mama’s had been in the end.
Mama had always been crying about something. She would go around to all the neighbors hunting for misery, her nostrils quivering for the scent of it. She would come home, recite this one and that one’s tale of woe, and then, “Oy, this world,” she would conclude, with the satisfaction of an amen. Beryl, in her saddle shoes and bobby socks, would think, Well, what of it?
Beryl...
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