I was buying a twelve-dollar toaster at a pawnshop in Cape Girardeau when I saw the silver locket I threw into the Mississippi at seventeen. Same dent by the hinge, same crooked initials: M.L. plus R.T. The clerk said an older man had pawned it that morning and told him, she never wanted the truth anyway. By closing time, I had his name from the ticket and my hands on the counter so they would stop shaking.

I had not been inside a pawnshop in years. My toaster died on a Tuesday, and I refused to pay fifty dollars for a new one at Target when I only toast English muffins and the occasional frozen waffle for my grandson.

So I stopped at Riverbend Pawn on my way home from the dentist.

The place smelled like metal, old carpet, and somebody’s microwaved chili. There were fishing rods along one wall, guitars behind the counter, and a shelf of mismatched coffee makers that looked like they had all lived hard lives. I was reaching for a little white toaster when the jewelry case caught the light.

There it was.

A heart-shaped silver locket on a black velvet pad, priced at eighty-six dollars. I told myself no. I told myself there had to be thousands like it in the world. Then I saw the dent.

When I was seventeen, my boyfriend Russell Tate had borrowed my father’s flathead screwdriver to pry that locket open after the clasp stuck. He slipped, and the hinge dented. He had apologized for two days and bought me a cherry Coke at the Dairy Queen with his last sixty-three cents. Inside, he had scratched our initials with a pocketknife.

Mary Louise and Russell Tate.

I threw that locket into the Mississippi on August eighteenth, 1981, after my mother told me Russell had left town with a girl from Cairo and did not care enough to say goodbye. I can still hear the sound it made. Not a splash, really. More like a tiny tick before the river took it.

I asked the clerk if I could see it. He was a thin man named Evan with a Cardinals cap and nicotine stains on his fingers. He unlocked the case and placed it in my palm. The locket was cold. Heavier than I remembered.

I opened it with my thumbnail. The initials were there. So was something else. A tiny folded piece of paper tucked behind the old photo space.

My mouth went dry. I did not pull it out. Not yet.

Some part of me was still the seventeen-year-old girl who had believed her mother because believing Russell hurt worse.

I asked where it came from. Evan shrugged. A guy pawned it this morning. Paid him forty dollars.

What guy, I asked.

Can’t give that out, he said.

I set the locket back down, though everything in me wanted to close my fist around it and run. Evan looked at my face and softened a little. He was older, Evan said. Maybe late sixties. Gray beard. Walked with a cane.

Russell would have been sixty-one. Not late sixties. But men who disappear from your life do not age correctly in your head.

Did he say anything, I asked.

Evan looked toward the back room like he was deciding how much trouble a sentence could make. He said, she never wanted the truth anyway.

The floor seemed too far away. I put both hands on the glass counter and stared at the locket until the silver blurred.

I bought it. Eighty-six dollars plus tax. Evan wrote the pawn ticket number on the receipt by accident, or maybe on purpose. Eleven eighty-seven dash C.

At home, I sat at my kitchen table with the locket in front of me. The house was quiet except for the clock above the stove ticking too loud. I had tomato plants outside that needed water, laundry in the dryer, and a life that had gone on for forty-three years because I thought Russell chose to leave it.

I unfolded the paper with tweezers from my sewing basket. It was not a love note. It was a hospital wristband.

Russell Tate. St. Anne’s. August nineteenth, 1981.

The day after my mother said he ran away.

I picked up the phone, found Evan’s number on the receipt, and dialed before I could talk myself back into being obedient. Evan answered on the third ring. I told him who I was and asked for the name on the pawn ticket. He hesitated, the sound of static and old radio fuzz humming through the line.

He didn’t give me the full name, just the initials from the ledger, but he read me the address the man used. A small brick house two miles from the river, right off Broadway. I drove there with the locket sitting in the passenger seat like a small, cold stone.

The house had gray siding and an overgrown boxwood hedge out front. A rusted Buick sat in the driveway with flat tires. I walked up the concrete steps, my boots crunching on old maple pods, and knocked on the screen door.

An older man with a silver beard and a heavy gray flannel shirt pulled the inner door open. He leaned hard on a wooden cane, his left leg stiff, staring at me through the mesh with cloudy blue eyes that didn’t quite focus at first.

You looking for someone, he asked, his voice raspy and dry like old paper.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the locket by its chain, and let it swing against the screen. I didn’t say anything for a long second because I couldn’t find my breath.

You kept it, I finally whispered.

Russell didn’t drop his jaw or step back. He just looked at the silver heart spinning slowly in the porch light. He shook his head once, a slow, tired movement that told me everything my mother had stolen from us.

I told you she wouldn’t let you have it, Russell said softly through the screen. And you never asked me twice.