Inheritance

She was already dying. She had been, for so long, dying. A word that won't explain her. Her narrow row home in southwest Philadelphia explained her. Her cool concrete back stoop, one alley shy of the hoop swish and sneaker squeak of the community basketball game. Her basement: cave dark damp, clotted webs, arranged according to the roll-top desk and the movie magazines and the orange wedding dress hanging from a wire. A photograph of a girl on a horse. Hats, I think, or I imagine, my memory strange and scrambling.

The day she died the sky received her. I looked up when my father said the words and something streaked or blurred, and that is where, in the years afterward, I wanted to believe I'd find her.

Look up.

Not long after my grandmother died, the things she'd chosen, worn, or made were disappeared by the woman my grandfather met at a foxtrot hall and married, it seemed to me then, within hours. (My brother says not hours. My brother says years. I don't remember years.) My grandmother's history was hauled to the curb and abandoned. Her Easter Sunday platters. Her Frank Sinatra radio. The defiant hues of her wedding dress. The paintings she'd found at flea-market fairs and nailed, at escalating heights, to the staircase wall. My grandmother had been radically foreclosed by the woman who'd replaced her, and in my mother's rush to save any material remnant of her mother's life, she salvaged only a silver hair brush, a few hooked rugs, cracked photographs, a Bible, and a tiny pearl on a slender chain.

My mother. Lore.

That pearl was placed in my trust. For years after, there was the sky above and a white globe at my neck, until, one day—I was a mother by then—it was gone. The slim chain broke and the white globe fell, and I searched for it, I searched for it, winter through spring then summer, the sky above roiling in and rumbling out. No pearl among the dry-rot leaves

along the creek bed. No pearl like a seed within the arthritic roots of leaning oaks. No pearl smudg