Self-doubt - Darcy Vebber

Lisa wrapped each piece she took from the china cabinet in newspaper. The tips of her fingers felt greasy and strange. So odd to be rolling all these things up in words. As soon as her mother got down to Phoenix and started unpacking, the words would be balled up and thrown away and the things would go in to another cabinet.

Her mother looked over her shoulder, critically as if she was appraising someone else’s treasures not her own. “Is it worth taking all this?”

Kate suggested taking it in to Russell’s, the trading post store in town. She had never been past the soda cooler at the entrance and only knew it as a place other families took their old things.

Alice laughed.

“That stuff is pawned,” Lisa said. “They come back for it.” She examined a figurine, a boy in a top hat. On the bottom there was a watery green stamp that seemed to say it had been made in Germany.

“And it’s worth something,” said Alice. “This stuff is junk.”

All Lisa’s life, this boy had been in this china cabinet, on this shelf across from a girl in a head scarf and a white porcelain dress scattered with tiny red flowers. This was the first time she had ever been allowed to touch it. They were her grandmother’s things but she had never met that grandmother, her father’s mother. He went down to her funeral in Tucson, when Lisa was a toddler and Alice was pregnant with Kate, all alone. She finished rolling the boy up in newsprint and made a space for the ball of paper in the cardboard box of plates and bowls. “I don’t care,” she said.

She picked up the girl and looked into her round white face. She had big, dark eyes, rose colored lips and blonde curls beneath the scarf. When Lisa was small, she wanted desperately to taste this whiteness, to feel the smooth cool surface with her tongue. Now, it hurt to recall even things like that, things that had nothing to do with her father, really. It was as if any looking back was dangerous.