The dealer’s daughter would not give us a name — she was decent about it, and right — but she forwarded a message.

And a woman named Bernadette Coyle, sixty-eight years old, retired postal clerk, who collected Victorian lockets because her own mother had one, wrote back four days later and said she had wondered about Cora for a year and a half and would like very much to know.

So I wrote it out. My grandmother Cora Mercer, married in 1951 to a man who shipped out sixteen days later and came back nineteen months after that, and the locket he bought her with the back pay, engraved with a sentence about the waiting because he wasn’t a man who could say it any other way.

It had a photograph in it once. It didn’t when I pawned it. I’d taken it out and I have it still, in a book.

Mrs. Coyle wrote back the same day.

She would not take more than she paid. I pushed twice and she got a little sharp with me the second time, in a way that reminded me so much of my mother that I stopped.