The Imperfects Read online

  “So unless someone has, what, mined a huge yellow diamond and kept it a secret for centuries, this has to be the Florentine?”

  “I’m surprised it hasn’t been recut. Usually if diamonds have been missing—” Beck notices that Viktor doesn’t say stolen “—they’re recut so they can’t be identified. Your grandmother must have been pretty attached to this diamond if she didn’t cut it. Instead, she hid it in a midcentury brooch.”

  Beck’s attention shifts between the photo of the hatpin and the orchid brooch sitting on Viktor’s table. The orchid brooch, with its tiny pavéd stones, looks so different than the tiered hatpin, with its chunky round and square diamonds. It’s difficult to believe they had held the same stone. But that was the idea.

  Viktor studies Beck, and she realizes she’s frowning. “This is good news. This diamond is going to make you very rich.”

  “If it’s legally mine.”

  Viktor shrugs. “There are people who don’t care about that sort of thing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We need to get it graded.”

  “Graded?”

  While Viktor finds a box for the diamond, he explains that before they can establish that the diamond is the Florentine, they must send it to the International Gemology Society to verify that it is in fact a diamond. After testing it, IGS will issue a colored diamond grading report, detailing the growth features, the clarity characterizations, and the measurements of the diamond.

  “Is it safe, sending it to them?”

  “They are the best in the world. I’ll deliver it to their offices myself. And everything’s anonymous, so even when they confirm it’s real, they won’t know whom they are confirming it for.”

  Beck’s phone buzzes. It’s Ashley. Can you make sure there’s food at the house on Sunday? You know how I get if I haven’t eaten. She includes an emoji of a monster, as though that makes her text cute. Ashley has a way of texting like everyone is her employee. Although she has a surprising number of employees for someone who doesn’t work—babysitters, a dog walker, a trainer, a housecleaning service—Beck isn’t one of them.

  It’s a shiva, Beck writes. There’s no such thing as a Jewish event without food.

  Great! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, Ashley responds. Momentarily, Beck feels bad for being uncharitable toward her sister, then remembers that there’s nothing for Ashley to do; Beck has already taken care of everything.

  The time on her phone says 3:30 p.m. “I’ve got to get to court to file the paperwork.”

  Viktor holds the brooch out to her, hollow at the center where the yellow diamond once sat. “There are a few carats of emeralds here. Diamonds, too. You can always sell them and melt the platinum down. And some unsolicited advice, it’s probably best not to list the brooch as an asset of the estate. Just until we’re clear what we’re dealing with.”

  Beck knows what Viktor is really saying. If it’s listed as an asset, there’s a record of it. Taxes will be due, steep taxes, and she will have to sell. Before she can sell, she will have to prove it’s legally hers. For now, until she’s certain of its value, it’s just a sentimental heirloom, a worthless piece of costume jewelry that no one will fight her for.

  Beck hesitates as they walk toward the front door. “How rich will this diamond make me?”

  Viktor purses his lips, calculating in his head. “The diamond is worth about three million. If we can confirm it’s the Florentine, I’d suspect you could get ten for it.”

  Beck coughs at more money than she’s ever envisioned, more money than she owes in worthless law school loans and the remaining credit card debt her mother racked up in her name when she was a teenager.

  “Ten million?” Beck manages to whisper.

  “With diamonds like that, it’s the history, the lineage, that gives it most of its value. It’s one thing to have a diamond that is 137 carats—it’s another thing to have a 137-carat diamond that belonged to Marie Antoinette and Napoleon.” Viktor explains that Marie Antoinette, a Lorraine-Habsburg herself, wore it on her wedding day. Napoleon’s second wife, also of Austrian royal decent, held on to it during her brief tenure as the French empress.

  In the elevator, Beck forgets about how Tom had kissed her in that small marble-and-mirror interior. The rush of so much money lasts a few floors until she feels nauseous. She’s positive the grading report will prove the diamond is the Florentine. She’s also fairly certain that Helen knew this wasn’t a piece of cheap costume jewelry, that when she’d called it her yellow diamond brooch in her will, it’s because it was a yellow diamond brooch. So why hadn’t Helen sold it and elevated herself from her modest circumstances? There were plenty of people who didn’t care about things like good faith or proof of lawful ownership. Why would she have kept something so valuable? And if Helen knew how much it was worth, far more than the house or any savings under her mattress, why had Helen left it exclusively to Beck?

  When the doors open to Viktor’s lobby, Beck can’t get her legs to move. The exception written into Article IV. My yellow diamond brooch. She’d sent the will to her family.

  She grabs her phone and skims through their short, almost callous responses to her email. No one mentioned the yellow diamond brooch in the will. Her body relaxes. Of course they didn’t notice. That would require an attention to detail none of the other Millers has. Besides, they have no reason to suspect that anything in the will is unusual, that with those four small words—my yellow diamond brooch—Helen left Beck a fortune.

  “Going up?” a man asks as he steps into the elevator. She shakes her head and darts out. As she steps onto Eighteenth Street, Beck nods at the doorman, who looks at her suspiciously, or maybe that’s just her imagination. Beck feels guilty, and she knows that guilt isn’t over something she’s done but something she’s about to do.

  When she meets her family at the cemetery, she won’t tell them about Helen’s brooch. It isn’t about money. The brooch was Helen’s secret. In leaving it to Beck, she’s passed its secrecy on to Beck, too.

  Four

  Deborah can’t believe she’s late. Sure, her internal clock runs about ten minutes behind the time on her cell phone, but how can anyone be late to her own mother’s funeral?

  When she races up the snow-covered hill to the plot, the looks on her children’s faces convey that they are not surprised by their mother’s tardiness.

  The rabbi stumbles when she sees Deborah huffing and puffing before she continues to read in Hebrew. Her voice is soft and rhythmic. Although the words sound like gibberish to Deborah, they are comforting. Of course Helen would have requested a female rabbi. She’d always insisted her doctors were women, her dentist, her hairdresser. If she could have found female gravediggers, she’d have wanted them, too.

  “You’re late,” Beck whispers, her eyes steady on the rabbi.

  “I got lost.”

  “How do you get lost in Bala Cynwyd?” Beck hisses.

  “You’re being rude,” Ashley says to Beck and Deborah, even though, other than the rabbi, there is no one there to take offense. Helen had specified that she wanted her funeral graveside, for family. Deborah knows that the only family Helen had were the Millers. She never learned precisely what happened to Helen’s parents and brother, only that they hadn’t survived the Holocaust. Although she’s heard countless stories of her grandmother Flora, who would take Helen to the cinema, her brother, Martin, and father, Lieb, who would ride the Ferris wheel with her, Helen never told Deborah the stories of their deaths. And Deborah had never met her father’s family. He died in Korea when she was two. Whatever family he had, as far as Deborah knew, Helen had never met them, either.

  Deborah rubs a crystal in her coat pocket, trying to center herself as the rabbi recites the Mourner’s Kaddish. Despite being only a few miles from her childhood home, she really did get lost. How was she supposed to know there were two Laurel Hill Ce
meteries? As she listens to the rabbi, Deborah realizes, subconsciously, she was late on purpose. So much easier to arrive once the ceremony already started, once she could avoid an uncomfortable reunion with her children.

  Beck can feel Deborah’s manic energy, so she steps away from her. She just walked up to Beck and stood beside her as though they were allies. Even though Beck is the least distant from Deborah, that doesn’t make them close. They talk maybe once a month, usually about Helen. Beck can count on one hand the times she’s seen her mother in the past year. She continues to inch away from Deborah, but any farther and she’ll be standing right beside Jake. She doesn’t want to be allies with him, either.

  Icy wind slaps Jake’s face as he listens to the rabbi. Was March in Philadelphia always this cold? He’s been on the west coast too long and doesn’t own a proper winter coat, so he stands graveside, hugging his jean jacket to his body. Jake’s eyes sting from a sleepless night on the red-eye. His flight landed at six thirty that morning, and he’d taken a cab to Edgehill Road. He’d wanted to see the house one last time as Helen’s. It looked exactly as he remembered, as though he could skip up the walkway to the porch and find Helen in her wool slacks, sipping brandy on the couch inside. Jake sat on the steps, feeling the warmth of the morning sun through the biting cold. It was going be tougher than he anticipated, seeing Beck, seeing Deborah.

  He was first to the cemetery, and fortunately Ashley was next to arrive. He hugged her before asking, “Isn’t there something we can do about the house?”

  “Like what?” Ashley looked tired, not like Jake did from the red-eye, but a prolonged fatigue that had turned her skin sallow.

  “We can’t let Deborah have it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of everything she put us through.”

  “That was years ago.” Ashley had only lived on Edgehill Road for one year. She wasn’t around when Deborah’s weeklong retreats turned into months-long disappearances. She didn’t witness how it had changed Beck, made her withdrawn until their once bubbly younger sister became defensive and secretive. “It’s just an old house.”

  “You know she’s going to sell, first chance she gets,” Jake said, trying a different approach.

  “If it goes to us, we’ll just sell, too.” And then Ashley being Ashley asked him, “Do you need money?”

  Before Jake could tell her this wasn’t about money, Beck stepped out of the back of a blue sedan. She walked toward them like she was debating turning around and jumping into her Lyft.

  Beck hugged Ashley deeply, as siblings should. She hesitated, then hugged Jake, too. He tried to hold her closer and longer, but she pulled away almost immediately.

  When Jake broached the topic of the house with Beck, she was distracted, her eyes everywhere except Jake.

  “Leave it alone,” she warned. He didn’t know if she meant the house or their relationship.

  “It doesn’t make you mad that it’s going to Deborah?”

  Beck turned to him, and he’d preferred when she wouldn’t meet his eye. “You don’t even live here.”

  While Jake knew he should let it go, he couldn’t help himself.

  “But to Deborah?”

  “You know nothing about their relationship,” Beck said, walking away to greet the rabbi.

  Now, Jake watches his sister twitch with anger and doesn’t understand. How can Beck be this angry and not want to fight for the house? How can Deborah get the house, their house, when she couldn’t even bother to show up on time to Helen’s funeral?

  Ashley and Deborah turn toward Jake, and he realizes it’s his turn to sprinkle dirt on Helen’s casket. Jake’s surprised Helen would have wanted a funeral. Helen always said that spending money on the dead was like watering plastic plants. No, Helen was more the type to say, Burn my body and throw the ashes out with the trash. This thought paralyzes him. How could he think this? Helen would never burn her body.

  The soil is cold and gritty against his palm. He takes the biggest handful he can and lets it slip through his fingers into the open grave below. Jake only knows the outline of Helen’s family’s story, but he knows that if her family didn’t return from the camps, they didn’t get pine boxes lowered into the ground.

  Ashley is the last one to throw dirt on her grandmother’s casket. She takes a small handful and tosses it as quickly as possible into the grave. She’s starting to regret staying for three nights, for leaving the kids home with Ryan. If Lydia and Tyler were here, the Millers would have a reason to remain civil. Deep breaths. She didn’t get sucked into their drama when she was a teenager; she will not get sucked in now. She has enough of her own real, life-changing issues to worry about.

  Once the ceremony is over, Beck follows Deborah to her VW Rabbit—the Red Rabbit as her mother has taken to calling it—while Jake and Ashley walk in the opposite direction toward Ashley’s SUV. Beck’s phone buzzes, and she stops to check a text from Viktor. Grading is complete. Should be getting the diamond and report within the hour.

  Already? Beck writes. The grading report was supposed to take a week, even with Viktor’s connections.

  It’s not every day the lab gets a 137-carat yellow diamond. Beck notices that he doesn’t call it the Florentine.

  Deborah waits by the Red Rabbit for Beck to catch up. While Beck cannot imagine her mother in any other car, she also can’t believe the old beast is still running. The maroon paint has rusted and oxidized. The leather piping along the seats has chipped off, but the car is still in one piece.

  “I need to go do something for work,” Beck says. “Just real fast.”

  “You’re serious?” Deborah asks. “It’s Sunday. And the day of your grandmother’s funeral.”

  Beck finds her keys and takes the one to Helen’s house off the ring, holding it out to her mother. Deborah shakes her head and dangles her keys. “I already have one.”

  “I’ll just be an hour. I have to drop something off.”

  Deborah unlocks the passenger door and opens it for Beck. “I’ll drive you.”

  “No, it’s fine. Really. You should be there in case any of Helen’s friends come. It’s your house now.” Beck reaches into her purse for the agreement she’s drafted, acknowledging that they have all read and accepted the terms of the will. The Millers need to sign it before she can release the assets of the estate, before the brooch is officially hers, before the house is officially Deborah’s. “I need you to get Jake and Ash to sign this.”

  “What is it?” Deborah asks without reaching for it. Beck knows she’s feeding Deborah to the lions, but Deborah deserves this. If she’s going to keep the house, she will have to endure the opposition and anger that comes with it. It’s just an added bonus that this frees Beck from having to get her siblings to sign the agreement, from the morally dubious territory of not mentioning the brooch to them.

  “It’s just a formality, acknowledging we’re all aware of the distribution of assets in the will. Once everyone signs and I get the short certificate, I can start distributing the assets.” The legal jargon is intended to bore Deborah into compliance, and she looks dumbfounded. “It means you can get the house.”

  Deborah takes the paper. “They don’t want me to have it.”

  Beck isn’t used to seeing her mother look this defeated. “Helen did.”

  Deborah shuts the passenger door and walks to the driver’s side of the car. “I still don’t think it’s right, them making you work today.”

  “I’ll let them know you think that.”

  “We’ll see you in an hour,” Deborah tells more than asks Beck. The Red Rabbit coughs as Deborah turns the key in the ignition. She watches her daughter’s slender figure grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

  Deborah hadn’t meant to foist her parenting obligations onto Helen. After Kenny left, that period of her life is a blur. The months she spent searching for Ke
nny. The self-betterment conventions that it took her years to realize were a scam. The cross-country trips with men who never became boyfriends. The ideas that never became businesses. She could never explain any of it to her children. Helen had never asked for an explanation. When Deborah returned, she welcomed her home without so much as admonishing, You’re a mother. Mothers don’t leave their children. Deborah was also a daughter. As a daughter, she’d left, too.

  * * *

  Viktor is waiting for Beck with his signature glass of champagne. His face falls when he notices the black ribbon pinned to her sweater.

  “You’re just coming from the funeral. I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  She shrugs and takes one of the flutes from Viktor. “Please tell me we’re celebrating.”

  Viktor giggles, unable to contain his excitement. She follows him into the living room where a glossy pamphlet from IGS—the International Gemology Society—rests beside the box with Helen’s yellow diamond.

  When she opens the report, a sketch of Helen’s yellow diamond stares back at her. Numbers and descriptions fill the report: the diamond’s dimensions and proportions, its polish, its color grade and clarity characteristics, its inclusions and UV fluorescence, which Viktor explains is the color that it emits under a UV light. In the comments section, the gemologist listed the uniqueness of the cut, the number of facets, a heart-shaped feathering along the girdle.

  Viktor points to the drawing of the diamond with a marking of the heart inside. “That’s a tiny crack within the diamond. Probably why your grandmother didn’t have it cut. If someone tried to cut it, it may have cleaved the diamond and ruined it.”

  Viktor keeps calling it the diamond, not the Florentine. The grading report says nothing about the Florentine Diamond, either.