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the sheets. I lifted the top mattress so Amy could gather the dust ruffle and there, under the mattress, was a satin envelope purse that was padded like a small pillow. Grandmere’s embroidered initials appeared in the lower right-hand corner.
    “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Amy asked, switching to French and looking at her mother.
    “I don’t know what it is. It looks as if Grandmere made it.”
    I dropped the mattress, and the three of us sat on the edge of the bed, lined up like three twittering birds on the edge of a fence rail.
    “Go ahead. Open it.” Mrs. DuPree said.
    Amy unlooped the elaborate closure, placed her hand inside, and pulled out a handful of crumpled bills. She alsopulled out an ivory linen note card sealed with wax and embossed with Grandmere’s initials.
    “It’s for you,” her mother said. “It has your name on the envelope, Amelie.”
    We all glanced at each other as if we had found buried treasure.
What if we hadn’t lifted the mattress to remove the dust ruffle?
I thought.
The new owners of the bed and this house would have been in for quite a surprise one day when they moved the bed.
    Amy broke the wax seal, opened the envelope, and blinked at the handwritten note. “It’s written in French, Mom. I’m going to need some help.”
    Between the two of them the message was translated and the meaning made clear. Grandmere had saved all the money she had received for her seamstress work since they had moved to Memphis. Every dollar had been tucked into the elegant satin purse so Amy could use the collected sum to “experience the one thing I have longed for but will not do again in my lifetime.”
    “What did she mean?” I asked.
    “Paris!” Amy and her mom said in unison.
    “She always wanted Amelie to go to Paris,” Elie DuPree said with a wistfulness I found as intoxicating as I had when I was a child. She always pronounced Paris as the French would,
Pair-ee.
And
Pair-ee
rhymed so nicely with
Amelie,
as in “Amelie must go to Pair-ee!”
    The only answer that rhymes with “Amelie must go toPair-ee” is,
“Oui, oui, mon ami!”
And that, I knew, meant, “Yes, yes, my friend.”
    The question was, had I moved far enough away from my disastrous experience in Paris to answer Amy with, “Oui, oui, mon ami”? Then I realized a bigger question was whether I was still on Amy’s potential guest list.
    “Look, Mom.” Amy turned over the note. “There’s more on the back.”
    Elie translated for both of us. “Return to the linen shop of the du Bois family on Rue Cler and bless the family that first put a needle and thread into my young hands.”
    Amy looked at me, her eyes sparkling. “How much money do you think is here?” She emptied it all in her lap.
    She and I sorted and piled the cash with the same excitement we had shared the summer we set up our lemonade stand on the corner and hocked our overly sweetened wares for a dime a cup. Our take that day had been $4.10—enough to get us both into the air-conditioned roller skating rink for an entire afternoon. We practiced our spins in the center of the floor until our knees were bloodied and our egos bruised.
    After that we both thought we would do better at tap dancing. Yet we never were motivated enough to earn the amount needed for even one lesson.
    From Grandmere’s purse we extracted a total of $9,352.
    “Ooh la la,” Elie said under her breath.
    Amy didn’t say anything. She left the stacks of money on the bed as the three of us went back to work, side by side, silently packing up the remaining earthly treasures of a woman who had lived with seamless poise and left a silent gift behind for her only granddaughter.
    I kept thinking about how $9,352 represented an awful lot of tiny stitches. And all of those stitches had been made after Grandmere was fifty years old.
    Not until we had sorted, organized, and packed up Grandmere’s belongings did Amy say anything. “I have a question for you, Mom.”
    As I hung back,