“You’ll wear this someday, darling,” Grandma told me.
“Grandma, it’s 60 years old!” I laughed lightly.
“It’s timeless,” she insisted, with a firmness that made debate pointless. “Promise me, Catherine. You’ll alter it with your own hands, and you’ll wear it. Not for me, but for you. So you’ll know I was there.”
I gave her my word. How could I not?
At the time, I didn’t grasp what she meant by ‘some truths fit better when you’re grown.’ I assumed she was simply being sentimental. That was Grandma’s way.
I was raised in her house because my mother died when I was five, and my biological father, as Grandma told it, had left before I was born and never returned. That was all I ever knew about him.
She never offered more, and I learned early not to press. Whenever I tried, her hands would pause mid-motion and her gaze would drift somewhere far away.
