Coming Home(9)

It was gone. She had lost it.

She had lost her mother’s bracelet.

Leah’s father had given it to her mother on their eighth wedding anniversary, the same day she had given birth to Leah’s little sister. Embedded in the white gold of the bracelet were three solitary diamonds. One for each baby she had given him, he had said.

Leah had always loved that bracelet, even before it was hers.

With a pathetic sniffle, she started the car and pulled dejectedly out onto the street. She had combed the deli, scoured the sidewalk, torn apart her purse, shook out her clothing, searched the car. Someone must have taken it. There was nowhere else it could be.

She approached the stoplight at the end of the street, still fighting tears, when suddenly it hit her.

Leah bolted upright in her seat. “Oh my God,” she said to herself, slamming on the brake before making an outrageously illegal U-turn in the middle of the intersection. The orchestra of horn blasts only served to amplify her urgency as she sped down the road that would take her back to her old house.

Traffic had started to pick up, making the ride back to the house twice as long as it should have been. By the time she pulled onto her old street, it was already dark. There were still no parking spaces on the road, so she pulled into the empty space in front of Catherine’s driveway again, throwing the car in park and not even bothering to turn it off before she jumped out. She ran to the gate and unlatched it, flinging it open as she bolted across the tiny yard.

Leah knocked on the door, standing up on her toes so she could see in the tiny window along the top of the door. After about a minute of silence, she knocked again, this time a bit more forcefully.

Still nothing.

Desperate and having no shame, she walked to the window on the side of the house, cupping her hands around the side of her face and pressing her nose against the glass. The house was completely dark.

“Damn it,” she whispered, walking back to her car and plopping inside before she slammed the door closed behind her. She reclined the seat and cranked up the heat, fully intending to wait there until Catherine returned.

Forty-five minutes later, she was starving, she had to go to the bathroom so badly she thought she might cry, and it had begun to snow. The lights were still off in the house, and no one had returned. Was it possible that Catherine had already turned in for the night? If that were the case, she would feel like a complete moron waking the poor woman up and dragging her out of bed for something that might be a lost cause anyway.

Whatever the case was, Leah knew she couldn’t stay there any longer.

With a frustrated sigh, she sifted through her purse and pulled out an old receipt and a pen, leaning on the dashboard to scribble a quick note to Catherine.



Catherine,

I think I may have lost my bracelet in your house. It’s really important to me, so if you find it, could you please give me a call?



She signed it with her name and her phone number before throwing the pen somewhere on the passenger seat and exiting the car.

Leah walked quickly through the side yard, blinking back the snowflakes that peppered her vision as she opened the screen door and closed the note inside before running back to the car.

Twenty minutes later, she had just merged onto I-95 when a loud bang nearly forced her heart out of her chest. She gripped the wheel firmly, glancing in her side-view mirror; she couldn’t see anything that she might have collided with, and it definitely didn’t feel like the car took a hit.

Just as her body began to relax back into the seat, the car began to pull awkwardly to the right.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Leah groaned, putting her blinker on and fighting her way through the traffic over to the shoulder. She put the car in park and crawled over the console, opening the passenger door and hanging her head outside as snowflakes clung to her hair and eyelashes. Sure enough, the right front tire was completely flat.