The Cost of a Dime

Family heirlooms from a WWII internment camp

No jewelers there she told us and laughed, a hard, foreign sound to granddaughters who’d never heard of camp and internment in state school elementaries.

Against her curled palm the circle made from a dime tarnished and thin, her fingers too swollen now to wear the broken band my grandfather made decades ago with a hammer, a nail and a coin.

When they released families from barbed wire fences, she said, warehouses had been ransacked by thieves, a history destroyed for scapegoats. Squatters had taken over houses and doors, and our culture needed years to rebuild homes and hearths torn up by neighbors pretending to follow laws.

When she died my mother got the good pearls, my sister her jade necklace — they wore them to the Buddhist temple where we burned incense and cried together.

But I inherited my grandmother’s palm, the thinness of the band across it like our family’s war-tarnished name. My fingers are too big for the ring but I can hold history in my mouth as my daughters listen to the cadence of camp stories I tell them passed down from my grandmother about the value and reason for a dime.

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