materialistic yearnings

Yes, yes, we know I have many. I've established that.

But there is this one thing.

In a wooden box on his chest of drawers, in his dressing room, my father keeps a small silver milkmaid. She is a baby rattle. She is perhaps three inches high. She wears an apron and a little mob cap and her cheeks are sweetly apple rounded. She is perfect.

My mother told me that my father gave her to me when I was a baby, and that when I dropped it from my pram, he took it back. Bad child...

Perhaps that's why I want it still, with the deep, primal yearning of a small child crying for something she's not allowed have.

I used to sneak in and look at it, among the masculine, paternal debris that collected on his chest of drawers. The leather smell of men's shoes and expensive suits and ties. The green baize inside the box, it's smooth hinges, piles of loose change and cash, condoms... an alien territory.

He has a brass shackle he uses as a keyring, something significant from his sailing days, I think, that I seem to know he will leave to my brother. Someone must have told me that.

I worry, when I think about it, when I let myself feel the tiny weight of that sweet little thing in my hand, imagine it on a silver chain around my neck. Will he leave it to me?

I see myself going to his wife after he dies, asking for it. Walking away from the home that is now solely hers and touching the cheek of the little milkmaid, listening to her quiet rattle.