We nodded.
“That’s the maker’s mark. It tells us who created this. This was made by the Goldman family, but without knowing the history of the purchase, it loses some of its value—especially since it might have been traded illegally at some point. The Goldmans were a German Jewish family who had most of their possessions seized by the Nazis.”
A tiny shiver went down my back, tracing the line of my spine from crown to neck to spine, a dance of disbelief and anticipation. I glanced at Mom, whose wide eyes must have mirrored my own. She carefully crossed her hands in her lap. “The Goldman family,” she repeated. “Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“They’re our family.”
The appraiser went very still, like a hunter wary of startling his prey. He spoke with the soft, calm tone of the emotionally suppressed. “Excuse me?”
“It’s my mother’s family,” Mom said. “We’ve never heard of them being jewelers, though—but my mother was very young when she moved here from Germany.”
“Where was she from?”
Mom looked at me. “She was from a little town called Lübeck,” I said. “Her parents were Herman and Sara Goldman. They were both born in Lübeck.”
He pressed his lips together, looking back and forth between us. “You’re sure?”
Mom bristled. “Of course we’re sure.”
“We have birth records and death records and everything,” I said, because I’d done a lot of hard work to find said records.
He nodded several times. Then he cleared his throat. “To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t expecting this sort of situation today. I have some due diligence to do, and then if you’re—interested—I might have a few more facts to share with you.”
Mom and I exchanged a glance. “Of course,” she said. When he asked, she scribbled her number and email down on a piece of paper for him.
“Thank you,” he said. He had the air my brother had when our parents interrupted him from gaming—polite but itching to dive back into his own world. Clearly we’d been dismissed.
Yet as we stood and I put the necklace back in its bag and my purse, my curiosity was too strong to be denied. “What about the necklace? Did you have an estimate?”
He looked up. “A necklace from the Goldmans of Lübeck, of yellow cut diamond?” He smiled, brief and wry. “I’d like to look into it a bit more, but I’d tentatively appraise it at eighty thousand dollars.”
Mom and I wound up at the Juice Bar.
“The Triple Chocolate Mountain flavor is very good,” I said.
“Is it. Well.”
We both ordered the flavor, took our cones, and sat down at one of the wooden tables. We stared at each other. Then we started laughing, small giggles at first, then loud, reckless, near-hysterical laughter.
“I tried googling them,” I said when we recovered. “O’ma’s parents. But nothing came up. Shouldn’t it have, if they’re well-known?”
“Maybe they’re only well-known in the antiquing sphere,” Momsaid. “And maybe it’s like with all those archives—the actual records about them haven’t been digitized.”
I placed the necklace between us on the wooden planks of the table. The stones (the diamonds, real diamonds) glistened in the sun. “What are we going to do?”
“What do you want to do?”
I shook my head, still too blown away to have any actual response. What do you do with eighty thousand dollars? I wouldn’t even know what to do with eight hundred extra dollars. Put it in my savings account?
“Well,” Mom said. “We could sell it and put it toward your college fund.”
Yet another exceedingly practical Mom answer. “I guess.”
“Did you want to spend it?” she asked with a smile. “I think it’d be better spent on education or your IRA, but a discretionary amount for something fun makes sense.”
Education made sense. Fun made atonof sense. Even if Mom only let me have a thousand dollars, I could do so many things—take a trip abroad, buy a million books. Maybe some new dresses.
