When it got late and the adults didn’t look like they were ending the party any time soon, Yiayia took Eleni and me to bed. Yiayia and Pappou only lived ten minutes away from us but we liked staying there. Yiayia made it fun. She let us ask her a million questions about when she was young and met Pappou and how handsome he was, and we sat in her bed with her and watched black-and-white movies and she kept bringing us snacks like we were queens.

We climbed the stairs drowsily, holding little bags of koufeta, which are sugar-coated almonds. Apparently, if you put them under your pillow, you dream of your prince. Eleni and I wanted to see if it worked, and if we had princes, what they looked like. We figured if we didn’t like the princes we dreamed of, we’d go down and get other bags of koufeta and try to dream of different princes, but we weren’t sure if that was allowed.

Yiayia was tired, too. We climbed on to her bed, sleepy and full of food, and watched her pull her dress over her blow-dried hair, which was beige, tough, and thick like wire. She had dark red fingernails at the end of her hands, which were so veiny, they looked like alien hands. Everything about her was interesting. Eleni and I could have investigated her body and her belongings for hours. We were fascinated by her saggy skin and amazed that ours would do the same when we were old. We liked Yiayia’s elbows best. She didn’t mind when we pulled the skin out to do the stretch test, even though our moms told us to stop doing it ages ago. The skin on her elbows was thick and rubbery—it didn’t spring back like ours did. It stuck out like nonelastic dough or a strange blobby skin creature.

We didn’t tell Yiayia that.

She put on her long pink nightgown, opened her closet, and lifted her jewelry box off the shelf. It was rectangular and wooden, with shiny pearly swirls covering the inside, and it had three tiers of rings and gems and trinkets.

“Ooh. Mini treasure chest. Can we see it?” Eleni asked.

“Is now the bedtime,” Yiayia said, taking off her earrings and dropping them in.

“Parakalo?” (That means please in Greek.) “Just for one minute and five seconds.”

Yiayia looked at Eleni and her eyes creased in a web of smiley wrinkles. “One minute and five seconds? Entaksi.” (That means OK.) “But no more.”

Eleni nodded eagerly. “Not a minute-second longer.”

“It’s a millisecond,” I told her, but Eleni ignored me. She was right, though: minute-second sounded miles better.

Yiayia carefully handed us the box and we gazed at it, picking up the brooches (ugly), the gold bracelets (heavy), the old-fashioned rings with stones set in them like flower petals (too big for every one of our fingers), and the crucifix necklaces (holy). Yiayia had a story for every one of them, but she was tired now and our minute and five seconds was running out fast, so we didn’t ask her to share them.

“Yiayia? Where’s the wedding necklace?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said winking. “I not keep it here now.”

“How come?” Eleni asked.

“I keep it in other place. Secret place.”

“Can we see it?” I asked.

“You say me one minute and five seconds.”

“Yeah, but that was for the jewelry box,” I said. “This is different. Please? Only for…thirty-seven seconds.”

“Thirty-seven seconds?” Yiayia laughed loudly. “You girls. So funny. You want see it?”

“YES!” we yelled.

“But thirty-seven seconds only—” she said holding up her finger.

“OK,” I said, although Eleni was looking at me as if that wasn’t long enough.

“—and then bed.”

“OK, Yiayia,” Eleni said. “It’s a deal.”

“Yes,” Yiayia said, edging off the side of the bed where she’d been sitting, “Yes. You right. Is veerrrrry important. The people who not knowing where is it they are come from, is like tree what not have the root.”

Eleni and I looked at each other excitedly because in our family, we had this very special family heirloom necklace. It had been worn by the women at their weddings for generations. My great-great-grandmother’s father had bought it for her wedding day from a Middle Eastern trader, and she’d passed it down, so my great-grandma and all her sisters wore it at their weddings and then Yiayia and her sisters. My mother and Aunt Sophia wore it at theirs, and Christina would wear it when she married Uncle Dimitri.

The tradition was that although everyone got to wear it, it was passed down to the oldest daughter in the family, so Yiayia got it after her mother died, and after Yiayia died, it’d be passed to my mom, and then she’d pass it to my sister Katerina and she’d give it to her oldest daughter. We knew it wasn’t ever going to belong to Eleni or me, but we’d get to wear it at our weddings, like all the other women in our family. And we knew how special it was to all of us.

Yiayia put her jewelry box away, closing the treasures inside the shiny lid.

“I show you wedding necklace,” she said, “but close the eyes. And not pooping.”

We giggled. “She means peeping,” Eleni said, but I knew that already.

We clapped our fingers over our eyes, but we both pooped through the gaps. I know this because I looked at Eleni and she looked at me and we giggled again silently but just using our shoulders this time. This is fun! we both said in whale song.

Yiayia shuffled in her slippers to the chest of drawers and said, “No look!”

“We’re no looking!” we said, even though we totally were. Before, I would have closed my eyes for sure, but now I kept them open. Lying is easy when you get used to it.

She opened the third drawer from the bottom, rummaged around at the back, then took out a dark cloth cover from underneath some clothes. Then she closed the drawer, came back to the bed, and said, “Entaksi. Open eyes now.”

She laid it next to us, opened the gold clasp, and unfolded the cloth.