8. — the dead mothers club. #3
“The outside. It had a couple of scuffs, a bit of paint stains. There’s still a bit of that on the bottom. It’s a well-loved bag, and honestly, I couldn’t bear to let them do anything to the inside.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” Carina murmured. “Do you want to be alone to open it up, or...?”
Frankie shook her head. “No, stay.”
Apparently, Carina had waited a long time to see this moment through. Probably adding to her own pain and struggle in a marriage that had sometimes looked more like a warzone than a happy home.
Loosening the strings of the dustbag, Frankie took her time to open and then slide the soft fabric down around the bag to expose the handles first. She gasped at the off-white alligator leather.
“It was a birthday gift from her own father,” Carina told her. “According to your father.”
The bag finally sat fully exposed on Frankie’s lap.
Her eyes watered as her fingertips explored the texture, knowing at one point in history, her mother had done the same thing.
She didn’t search for the imperfections Carina had warned about.
Those didn’t matter. Even if one day, she had her own collection of bags and investment pieces, this was priceless.
Irreplaceable.
“Okay, so now open it up,” Carina said.
Frankie’s gaze jumped to her stepmother. “What?”
“There’s a couple of things inside. I put them back once I got the bag back. Just...take a deep breath first.”
“Um, yeah, okay.”
Frankie undid the silver hardware before pulling the bag open.
The first thing to waft upward made her eyes close.
A sweet vanilla scent that somehow transported her to a place that didn’t exist. Yet, somehow, she could smell her mother as if she had that memory locked somewhere deep inside the recesses of her mind.
Except her mother died days before her first birthday. There was no way...
“There was an empty bottle of Vanilla Fields, it’s not a fancy brand or anything, at the bottom of the bag. It had leaked through the inside. Trying to clean it would have likely ruined—”
“Oh, my God, it’s my mom.”
Carina’s fingers squeezed Frankie’s knees through her dress. Her voice came out raspier than before when she said, “Yeah, it is. There’s um, a spool of paintbrushes in there and a key attached to a chain, a second house key. It has her name on it.”
Frankie dug for the items Carina spoke of.
First, she found the bottle of perfume which she held tight enough that her hand hurt, and her knuckles turned white.
Before long, she had the other items in her hands, too.
The paintbrushes, wrapped with a cord of brown leather, some still dirty with dried paint.
The keychain had her hand shaking as she stared at it.
Delilah Dove, it read. In her mother’s handwriting, scrawled across the tag attached to the chain holding the key.
She couldn’t breathe. Yet, she still smelled the vanilla. Soft and faint. Barely there at all, probably because of the years gone by.
“No crying on Birkins,” Carina suddenly said with her hands swiping gently at Frankie’s cheeks. “Oh, darling, we don’t cry on Birkins.”
She couldn’t stop.
Were they happy tears, as she promised Sissy?
Frankie couldn’t tell.
···
The noon sun barely filtered through the tinted glass of Frankie’s new Phantom Rolls.
In the previous fashion of her beloved Supra, her father custom ordered the same rose-gold paint.
She sat in the driver’s seat, adding the penthouse key attached to a small Statue of Liberty keychain to the one that had her mother’s name on it.
She’d add both of those to her Supra lanyard soon.
Salvatore watched her silently from the passenger seat, a large envelope in his hand.
“Carina didn’t have to go to the city,” she started to say.
The shake of his head stopped her from blaming herself for her stepmother’s exit from the estate shortly after Salvatore returned with the envelope and a birthday cake. Black forest cheesecake, Frankie’s favorite.
“That’s something she needs to do. She may have shared some things today that left her thinking she would be better feeling it all by herself. It’s been a day, huh?”
Frankie laughed weakly. “You could say that.”
“I’m proud of you, Sunshine. Whatever happens, whatever you choose to do or go on to seek, that’s never going to change.
And I’m about to give you something that will make all of that and more possible, so I really hope when I say I love you and I always will whether we’re five feet away or five universes, I mean it.
And wherever you are, if you are happy and doing the thing you love or trying to find it, I’m happy. ”
Salvatore didn’t allow her the chance to respond before he opened the thin package in his hands and turned the stapled paperwork around for her to see.
“There’s ten pages of a breakdown to a trust worth eight-hundred-ninety million dollars.
This money came from a mix of your mother’s inheritance and what remained of her family estate when it had finally been settled.
Some of the properties and other assets were sold over the years to add to your portion of the overall fund, although there are a few things you might find interest in. ”
Frankie stared at the papers, unable to really see. “Like what?”
“A traditional home with a very small property in Shanghai, China. A vacation home in the rural hills of Vermont. There are three condos, Florida, California, and...Boston, I believe. Upkeep and seasonal care of these properties are taken care of though the estate that handles the rest of this,” Salvatore added, tapping a finger on the paper.
“You don’t handle it?”