Lucy’s bee brooch

Lucy’s bee brooch is remembered as a flash of brightness on the practical winter coat she wore to pick up Willowdean Dickson and Ellen from school. Its importance lies not in its size or value, but in the shared childhood ritual attached to it: Lucy’s affectionate name for the girls, and the hot chocolate she took them for on Mondays. When Ellen asks Willowdean to look for the brooch among Lucy’s belongings, the keepsake becomes a way of recognizing that Lucy’s memory is shared, not Willowdean’s alone.

Appearance and Use

Ellen recalls the brooch as the one Lucy wore on the collar of her winter coat when she collected the girls from school. Willowdean remembers it there too. The coat was black, drab, and chosen for utility rather than fashion, a practical compromise associated in her mind with being a larger person. Against that subdued garment, the brooch seemed like sunlight appearing through dark clouds. The contrast makes the object memorable: a small decorative detail stands out where the rest of the coat reflects the limitations imposed on Lucy by a world that did not readily accommodate her body.

The brooch was part of an ordinary routine, not a formal occasion. Lucy called the girls her “bee-utiful girls” and took them for hot chocolate on Mondays, because Fridays did not deserve all the attention. The brooch’s recollection therefore brings back not just Lucy’s clothing, but her way of making a weekday outing feel like an occasion of its own. Its meaning is inseparable from the repeated gesture of collecting the girls and treating them with warmth.

A Shared Childhood Memory

Ellen raises the brooch while she and Willowdean are talking about Lucy. Her recollection confirms that the object, and the ritual surrounding it, belonged to both girls’ childhoods. Willowdean remembers the collar and the coat; Ellen remembers Lucy wearing the brooch and asks whether Willowdean remembers it too. Their overlapping memories give the keepsake a significance that cannot be reduced to a private possession or a single mourner’s account.

The weekday names prompt Willowdean to reconsider how she once understood her friendship with Ellen. She had thought of herself as a Monday and Ellen as a Friday, as though the different days marked a meaningful division between them. But Mondays and Fridays were only stretches of time with different names. The memory loosens that old contrast: the girls’ distinct identities do not erase the everyday experiences they shared, including Lucy’s Monday visits and the brooch they both remember.

The Request to Preserve It

Ellen asks Willowdean to look for the brooch among Lucy’s things, but makes the request conditional: only if Willowdean does not want it herself. She adds that she is not owed it, while admitting that she had always loved it. The delicacy of the request matters. Ellen expresses attachment without treating the object as her entitlement, and Willowdean promises to look for it. The exchange records a promise and a remembered affection; it does not establish that the brooch is found or given to Ellen.

That request changes how Willowdean understands her responsibility toward Lucy’s memory. Since Lucy died, Willowdean has felt that memorializing her aunt was hers alone, and that failing to do so would mean letting Lucy down. Learning that Ellen also holds loving memories of Lucy brings painful relief. The brooch gives that realization a concrete form: another person remembers the same detail, and that memory does not diminish Willowdean’s bond with her aunt. Instead, it makes clear that Lucy’s life reached beyond the household in which she died.

The Brooch Among Lucy’s Belongings

Willowdean’s concern for Lucy’s keepsakes takes shape while the family is confronting the possibility that her room will be cleared and changed. Six months after Lucy’s death, Willowdean still expects to find her aunt on the couch or doing crossword puzzles in the kitchen. She fears that without hearing or seeing Lucy she will forget her, and grieves that there are no photographs: Lucy disliked seeing her body reflected in pictures. Her mother, Willowdean believes, remembers Lucy chiefly through the circumstances of her death. In this setting, searching for a small remembered object becomes part of resisting a memory narrowed to absence and loss.

Other things found in Lucy’s room show how varied those acts of remembrance can be. Willowdean discovers Dolly Parton cassette tapes in a sock drawer and listens quietly to one on the stereo beside Lucy’s bed. She also finds an old, blank pageant registration form and a Dollywood Christmas ornament connected to a trip Lucy had hoped to take with Ellen’s mother but abandoned after learning she would need to buy an extra airplane seat. These objects carry different histories; the brooch, by contrast, is remembered through a shared weekly ritual. Together, they make Lucy present through particular habits, plans, friendships, and gestures—not merely through the fact of her death. The brooch remains especially intimate because its meaning rests on two friends remembering the same bright point on Lucy’s coat, and the same Mondays she made special.