What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

She did not whisper it. The hall was full, sixty or seventy people, the folding tables pushed end to end with white paper over them and a mason jar of mums on each one. Brenda from the choir was at the dessert table with the pie server in her hand, and I watched her stop cutting.

“She told me so,” Tina went on. “More than once. She said, Tina, that ring ought to go to somebody who’ll wear it. You never did care about nice things, Cindy. That’s not an insult. That’s just you.”

I looked for my brother. He was three feet behind his wife with a cup of sweet tea, studying the toes of his dress shoes like there was writing on them.

“Randy,” I said.

“Let’s not do this here,” he said, to the floor.

“I’m not doing anything,” Tina said. “I’m asking a simple question at a perfectly reasonable time. Everybody’s here. We may as well settle it while everybody’s here, before things get carried off and nobody remembers who has what.”

Mom’s ring was not a small thing in our family. My daddy, Gene, bought the stone in the fall of 1971 with the check from the best tobacco crop he ever raised. He drove to Paducah in his work clothes and came home with a diamond a little over a carat, in a plain gold setting, and he gave it to Mom on the back porch because he couldn’t wait until supper. She had been wearing a ten-dollar band for six years by then. She told that story every Thanksgiving of my life.

She wore that ring to wring out dishrags and set tomato plants and roll out biscuit dough. She wore it to bury my father eleven years ago. When her fingers swelled up this past summer, she finally took it off, and I never saw where she put it. I never asked.

I thought I knew, though.

“Twenty-eight years I’ve been in this family,” Tina said. She had turned a little, so the next table could hear her better. “Twenty-eight years. And I’ll tell you something, Cindy, and I’m not saying it to be ugly. Your mother never gave us one thing. Not one. Not when Kyle was born, not when Randy’s hours got cut, not ever. She had her favorites and that’s fine. But she can give me this.”

There was a serving spoon in the green beans that somebody had let go of, and I heard it slide down the side of the dish.

I have never been the loud one. Mom used to say I was born with my mouth shut and Randy was born with his open and they’d both stayed that way. I felt my face get hot, and I felt the whole room waiting to see what Dorothy’s girl would do, and all I could think was that my mother had been in the ground for forty minutes and this woman had been in her dresser for two days.

Pastor Mike was standing by the coffee urn. He is a big, quiet man, and he had gone very still.

“Mom left instructions about the ring,” I said.

Tina’s eyebrows went up. “What instructions?”

“A box.”

“What box?”

It was the truth. Back in April, on a good day, when she was still getting herself to the kitchen table for breakfast, Mom had asked me to bring her the cedar chest key. I brought it. She sent me to the store for buttermilk she did not need. When I came back there was a little cedar box sitting by her coffee cup, no bigger than a brick, the kind that used to come from a souvenir shop at Kentucky Lake. She had wrapped it shut with strapping tape, around and around, and she had written across the tape in blue ink in her schoolteacher hand.