Free The Truth about Mary Rose by Marilyn Sachs Page A

always go back to Lincoln next summer.
    They talked for a long time, but the important thing was that we were going to live in that house up here in the Bronx, and be close to my grandmother. Which made me feel pretty good.
    But I still couldn’t sleep. So after they were asleep, I got up, and opened Mary Rose’s box again. I took everything out, one by one, and tried everything on that was meant to be tried on. Mary Rose had cut most of the jewels out so that she could wear them. If it was a ring, she cut out the center part so it would fit around her finger. With the necklaces, she usually pasted on extra strips of paper and attached the ends so she could slip them over her head. Sometimes she used clear tape or stamp hinges. Just about all of them had fallen off or hung there, dry and brittle. But I could slip them over my head and hold them with one hand. Some of the bracelets were like the rings. You could slip your fist through them. The pins, I guess, she just held up to herself, although some of them had dried up pieces of tape on the backs.
    There was a diamond tiara that Mary Rose had pasted on a paper band that must have fit on her head. It was crushed flat by the weight of all the other cutouts that rested on top of it. When I opened it out, the paper on the sides looked like it would crumble. I slipped the tiara on my head, very carefully, and I looked at myself in the mirror. The tiara had a huge diamond in the center, and spears of diamonds that grew smaller and pointier toward the tops. All of the tops drooped now, but I squinted my eyes, and made myself blurry in the mirror, and there was Mary Rose, pale and beautiful, wearing her sparkling, pointed tiara, and looking like a queen.
    Then it came apart. I thought about taping it back together again. It didn’t seem right to put today’s tape on Mary Rose’s treasures. I put it down, and went back to taking out the other things.
    There were a few whole ads from magazines. There was one of a man and a woman kissing. The woman had her arm around the man’s neck. The arm had a watch on it, and the advertisement said, “A thousand tender words in one—$35.”
    There was another one of a sexy, red-haired woman with a tight, low-cut dress, holding out her hand and smiling at a ring with a great big diamond. The advertisement said, “Jewelry of the future— RHINESTONE— clear-cut and dazzling as an iceberg in sunlight—modern, unashamedly enormous—This supercolossal ring only $10.
    Mary Rose had written something on this ad. It was the only one where she had. She had made an arrow pointing to the woman’s head, and above it, she had written “Me.” She had written the “Me” with lots of swirls, and there was an exclamation point after it that was also fancy. The whole thing looked like this

    It was beautiful. It was the only writing I had that came from Mary Rose herself. I couldn’t figure why she wrote “Me” over that red-headed woman because I knew Mary Rose didn’t look anything like that. Maybe it meant that she wished she had a diamond ring too, or maybe she wished she was a grownup. Probably there was something about that woman in the picture that Mary Rose knew, and I didn’t know, that made her write “Me.” Like she might have been someone who was a famous musician, or maybe a rich lady who gave lots of money for starving children.
    There was no point in thinking about it. I was so happy to have her writing. It was the greatest treasure to me in Mary Rose’s box. Her own writing!
    There was something else in the box that I couldn’t figure. There were about thirty of those paper rings that go around cigars. They are really paper bands that keep cigars wrapped up in clear plastic paper. When you pull off the ring, the paper comes off too. There were thirty of them in Mary Rose’s box, all of them the same. They had the name EL CAPITAN stamped in the middle, and they were all red with gold borders and a picture of a gold lion