Ruth was waiting at the estate case. She did not have a tablet in her hand.
"Mrs. Reed," she said. "I'd be honored to help you today. If you'll let me."
"I'll let you," said Vivian.
Ruth unlocked the case. She lifted out the Art Deco necklace, the one from 1928, the one with the tiny engraved leaves worn soft by a hundred years of other women's skin, and she did not lay it on a tray. She came around the counter and stood behind Vivian at the tall mirror and fastened it around her neck herself, gently, her cool fingers working the box clasp and the safety, and then she stepped back.
Vivian looked at herself in the mirror.
The diamonds lay against her collarbone and caught the light and threw it back in a hundred colors, moving like water, like the lake on a summer morning. She was sixty-one years old. Her hair was gray at the temples. She was a widow and a grandmother and a retired principal from Bronzeville, and she was standing in the finest jewelry store on the Magnificent Mile wearing the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life, and nobody was watching her to see if she would steal it.
"Oh, Ray," she whispered. "Look at this."
She wore it for a long time. Ruth did not hurry her. Then she asked Ruth to take it off, and Ruth did, and laid it back in its case with both hands, carefully, the way you lay down something alive.
"I can't afford that one," Vivian said. "I knew that when I came in. I just wanted to wear it once, the way he wanted me to."
"I know," said Ruth. "What would you like to see?"
They looked at the single line of small round diamonds, set in white gold, that Vivian had seen in the case in June. It was eleven thousand two hundred dollars. Vivian took the soft white envelope out of the inside pocket of her purse and counted the money out on the black velvet tray herself, bill by bill, some of them so old the portraits were the small ones, while Ruth stood on the other side of the counter and waited and did not look away once.
There was two hundred dollars left over when she was done. She put it back in the envelope.
"For the literacy program," she said, handing it across the counter. "The one on the West Side. Give it to the young man who reads there on Saturdays, would you? Tell him it's from Raymond. Tell him it's for picture books."
That evening she sat at her kitchen table in Bronzeville with the new necklace around her throat and Raymond's envelope in front of her, empty now and soft as cloth. She looked for a long time at the three lines in his three different pens. FOR V'S DIAMONDS. DO NOT TOUCH, VIVIAN, I MEAN IT. ALMOST.
Then she took a pen of her own out of the jar by the telephone, and underneath his last word, in her neat principal's hand, she wrote one more.
DONE.
THE END