Trump Card

She guzzled the second drink while she waited for her daughter to arrive and introduce her to the foreigner she planned to marry. When she snapped her fingers and then knocked on the table, the waiter nodded. He understood the keep them coming gesture.

“Of all the bad news you can give, this is the worst,” she complained to her daughter the week before as she paced in the sitting room. “How do you know he's not marrying you just to become legal?”

Several hours of argument. No changing of minds.

Now she sat in the back of the restaurant in an immigrant section of town and drank the third glass of the thick liquid she preferred whenever she was upset. She played with the stones on her fingers and suffered another rush of ire as she remembered that her future son-in-law had not bought her daughter a ring.

A necklace! She thought. The server arrived with another drink. “Maybe in his corner of the world a necklace is the right kind of jewelry for an engagement, but it doesn't impress me,” she said to him.

“Momu, stop annoying the help.” Her daughter's arrival caused many heads to turn in admiration. She laughed, blew a kiss at her mother, and waved the server away.  She planned to make the few minutes before her fiance showed up very happy ones for her mother.

“Behold,” she said as she sat next to her on the banquette. “This is my gorgeous present.” She unlatched the chain and placed it on the tablecloth. She smiled as her mother put down her drink and, with opened mouth and widened eyes, picked up the true amber pendant.

“Daughter, do you know how rare and expensive this is?” she whispered, as she counted a dozen fossilized objects embedded in the resin. It was well understood among her circle of friends that collectors highly valued this gemstone with natural inclusions indicating mammalian life.

“Yes, Momu, it's the first one found in thirty years. And my love can afford any price,” she said with unrestrained pride.

“Wealth handed down the family line for generations?”

“Of course,” her daughter said. “The old-fashioned way.”

Her mother smiled. No need to worry about her child's future, then. She lifted the pendant and marveled at the pristine and complete specimen of bellicose creatures that, as legend has it, once roamed the world as soldiers in the Special Forces of the United States Army. This piece is truly a drama of ancient history, she thought, then looked up to see her daughter kissing her betrothed hello.

“Welcome to the family,” she said and extended her right arms. He bowed his three heads and kissed the back of her hands in reply.