What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

“Where’s the ring, Cindy?”

That was the first thing my sister-in-law said to me at my mother’s funeral luncheon. Not hello. Not I’m sorry about your mama. She set her hand flat on my forearm, the way you stop a child from running in a parking lot, and she asked me where the ring was.

I was holding a stack of paper plates. The fellowship hall at Hadley Chapel Methodist still smelled like coffee and baked ham, and the ham itself was sitting ten feet away under a tent of foil, still steaming. We had buried my mother forty minutes earlier. I still had cemetery clay on the heels of my good shoes.

“Tina,” I said. “What?”

“The diamond. Dorothy’s diamond.” She kept her voice pleasant, like she was asking where we kept the extra napkins. “I looked in her dresser Tuesday. It’s not in the jewelry box and it’s not in that little dish by the sink. So where have you got it?”

Tuesday.

Mom died on Monday, a little after four in the morning, in the back bedroom of the brick bungalow on Clay Street where she had lived for fifty-one years. I had been holding her hand. On Tuesday I was at the funeral home in Paducah picking out a casket spray, and I had asked my brother Randy if he and Tina would run by the house and find Mom’s blue dress, the one with the pearl buttons.

They brought the dress. I had not known Tina went through the dresser while she was at it.

“You looked in her dresser,” I said.

“Well, somebody had to keep track of it. You’ve had your hands full.” She patted my arm twice and took her hand away. “I just don’t want it walking off. People are in and out of that house.”

“I’m the people in and out of that house.”

“That’s what I mean, hon.”

I set the plates down on the dessert table, next to a chess pie somebody had already cut into. I did it slowly, because my hands wanted to do something else.

I should tell you who was in and out of that house. For the last 14 months of my mother’s life, it was me. Her heart had been wearing out for years, and after the second hospital stay the doctor in Paducah said she could not be alone at night. I am forty-nine years old. I moved into Mom’s spare room in August of last year and I went home to my own bed maybe one night in five.

I counted her pills into the little plastic boxes every Sunday night. When it got bad in the summer I slept in the recliner beside her bed, because she was afraid of waking up and not being able to find her breath, and she did not want to wake up by herself.

Randy came on Sunday afternoons and sat with her and watched ball games. He is my big brother and he loved her, and he is not a man who knows what to do in a sickroom. I don’t hold it against him.

Tina came twice in those 14 months. Once was Mother’s Day. The other time was to pick up a casserole dish she had loaned Mom in the spring.

So when Tina stood in the fellowship hall and told me she didn’t want the ring walking off, I knew exactly what she was telling me.

“It’s a funeral, Tina,” I said.

“It’s a diamond,” she said. “And your mother always meant it for me.”