Angelina's Oak Read online

Chapter 2

  When Angelina had come home later than expected, refused to eat dinner and stayed in her room that night with no music blaring, Paula knew something was up. She tried to talk to her before they went to bed, but Angelina insisted everything was fine and she didn’t want to talk about it. Paula had attributed it to typical teenage mood swings, but when it continued into the next day, she knew it was more than this.

  Paula was a protective mother who never wanted to see harm come to her daughter, be it from trusting the wrong people or trusting herself too much. Angelina was too sweet and too precious. For this reason she felt it was her responsibility to take liberty to occasionally snoop into her daughter’s private life or openly ask her embarrassing questions. She would police Angelina’s Facebook page, look through her scrapbook albums and sometimes check stowaway places that her daughter had in her room. Paula felt guilty each time she did this, but felt it was a maternal duty she had to conduct and wished her mother had done it to her. It would have kept her out of the trouble she was seeking to avoid her own daughter getting into. Her greatest fear was that one day she would find something like drug paraphernalia or condoms in her drawers or emails with sexting pictures. Except a few romantic emails from suitors she didn’t approve of, nothing distressing had come from her clandestine searches into her daughter’s private life.

  Why am I raising my own daughter in this crazy town, she rhetorically asked herself for the hundredth time. Many times she had considered moving back to where she was raised in Palm Springs to give her daughter a better environment, but too many factors swayed her from this. She was a single African American mother operating a single jewelry shop, with a small but strong celebrity-driven clientele that enabled her to live a relatively debt-free life in the upper-middle-income bracket. She was able to keep them in a small house in the hills her late husband and she had bought.

  That evening after Angelina came back from school looking depressed, the two sat quietly at the dinner table. Angelina picked at the food her mother had made her, nibbling here and there. Clearly she wasn’t her usual chatterbox self. Her mother gave her some time, expecting her to make the origination as to what was going on. Minutes passed with only the clinking of silverware. Since nothing was forthcoming, she took the matter up.

  “You usually don’t nibble at my potatoes au gratin. Something wrong with it?”

  “No Mom. I’m just feeling not myself, that’s all.”

  “Honey, is there something we should be talking about?”

  “No Mom, I just…” Angelina sighed heavily, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I didn’t think you would, but I think we should discuss it,” Paula said seriously.

  “Mom, there is nothing to discuss,” she said with frustration.

  “Is it about Dad?” Ever since the accident last year they had cried each other to sleep for a month. She thought her daughter was now mostly over it, but rarely brought it up for fear it would cause more grief.

  “No Mom, it’s not about Dad.”

  “So, it’s something, but not that.”

  “It’s nothing Mom!”

  “Okay, then tell me what is this?” her mother said and pulled a gold coin from her pocket and placed it on the table. She looked at her daughter with one eyebrow raised sharply.

  Shock and despair came over Angelina’s face. She had been trying for the past day to get the images and sounds from the incident out of her head and convince herself that it was all a dream. And now this! Her lips trembled and eyes began to well up.

  “Where did you find that?” Angelina asked, looking at it in fear.

  By her daughter’s reaction Paula felt she had stumbled upon some deep and dark secret her daughter was hiding from her and she got worried.

  “It was in your backpack Hon. Can you tell me how it got there?”

  “I don’t know how it got there,” Angelina said, clearly trying to avoid something.

  “You’re saying somehow an extremely rare gold coin just showed up in my daughter’s backpack?”

  Angelina was nearing tears. “Mom, I’m really confused right now. I had a really weird day yesterday and I think I’m going crazy and I have no idea how that got in there, okay?” The tears started to flow, which turned the mother’s tone to sympathy.

  “Honey, tell me yes or no, is there some criminality involved behind this?”

  Angelina shook her head and wiped her eyes.

  “Okay, so you aren’t hooked up with some counterfeiters or some smuggling outfit that is wanted by the FBI or something?”

  “Mom! I’m not hooked up with anyone! You screen my emails! You search my room! You spy on me when I’m at the mall! You scan every phone bill! How could I be involved in some secret crime ring? I can’t even keep my boyfriends secret from you!”

  “Okay, sorry. I felt like I had to ask, you know. These things are complicated and I want to be sure you aren’t being used as a dupe or something.”

  Angelina threw down her fork in anger, tears running down her face. “Why are you saying this? Why don’t you trust me?”

  Paula’s voice took an even more compassionate tone. “Clearly you don’t know what this is and that’s probably a good thing. Look angel, I am almost a hundred percent sure this is a fake and a good one at that because they have done it using real gold, which can be costly. I can confirm for you it is real gold, because that is my business, but for someone to even attempt to fake a coin like this would be really, really, really stupid.”

  “People counterfeit money all the time” Angelina replied, calming down from her tirade.

  “Not a coin like this, Baby. I looked it up on-line. Just the gold it is made of is worth maybe a thousand dollars. If it were to be an actual 1832 12-Star Half Eagle, which it is made to look like, it could now be worth a…million…dollars…” She let the words hang in the air for Angelina to fully comprehend. “Only a few are known to still exist and they are in places like the Smithsonian. Trying to fake one would be really stupid as any buyer is going to put it through all kinds of tests and get it certified before any money changes hands. Those gold coins are amongst the rarest and most valued coins in the world.”

  “Okay?” Angelina said with a frown and a shrug, unsure what reaction to have.

  “So honey, can you shed any light for me as to how this got in your backpack?”

  “It’s a long story Mom and I don’t even think I believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  Through tears and interludes to explain the various ways in which she must be losing her mind, Angelina told the story as best as she could remember to her mother.