What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

“It’s not a diamond, Brenda. It’s glass. It’s been glass for two years. Dorothy sold the diamond to put a furnace in my house and pay my taxes when we were about to lose the place, and she never told anybody, and she left me the ring anyway. I stood in this room on Thursday and said she never gave us one thing. I said it right about where I’m standing. I was wrong, and I wanted to say so in the same place I said the other.”

You could have heard a napkin drop.

Brenda looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at me, and I nodded.

“The foot doctor,” Brenda said slowly. “She told me it was the foot doctor.” She shook her head. Then she pulled a paper cup off the stack and filled it. “Here, Tina. You take cream?”

That was a month ago.

Tina has not taken the ring off. She wears it to the dentist’s office in Paducah where she works the front desk, and when patients say what a pretty diamond, she tells them. Randy says she tells them every time.

She came to Clay Street the next Saturday without being asked, in old jeans, with a bucket. She scrubbed Mom’s kitchen floor on her hands and knees while I sorted the hall closet. We did not talk much. Around noon she asked me where the Monday tapes went, and I showed her the list, eleven names in blue ink, with notes beside each one. Takes two sugars. Hard of hearing, sit on his left. Do not let her give you the cat.

“I could take the ones out toward Kevil,” Tina said. “It’s on my way home.”

So she does. Every Monday after work she carries five cassettes to five kitchens and sits down for a cup of coffee she doesn’t want. Last week one of the shut-ins told her she reminded her of Dorothy. Tina called me from the car to tell me and couldn’t finish the sentence.

And side two.

I waited until they had all gone home that Thursday, like she said. Dale took Amy to get her things. I sat down in my mother’s chair by the stove for the first time, and I turned the cassette over, and I pushed the button on the far left.

There was not a speech on it. She must have just set the recorder on the counter one evening and let it run. For thirty minutes it is the sound of my mother washing supper dishes in that kitchen. The water runs. A skillet knocks against the sink. And over it, not for anybody, she is humming “In the Garden,” a little flat, the way she hummed it every night of my childhood through my bedroom wall.

Near the end the water shuts off. You can hear her dry her hands. She comes over close to the machine.

“That’s for the nights you can’t sleep, Cindy Lou,” she says. “You didn’t ask for a thing. I noticed.”

Then the button pops up.

I have played it every night since. I never got the diamond, and neither did anybody else in this family, and I would not trade that tape for a stone the size of a hen’s egg.

Tina got the ring. I got my mother’s voice. I think Mom knew exactly what each of us was really asking for, and she taped the box shut so we’d have to find out together, sitting down at her table.