What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

“And she let me think it.”

“She let you think somebody loved you and didn’t want the credit,” he said. “That part was true the whole time.”

The tape clunked. Mom was back.

“All right. I expect that took a minute. Now, the ring. There’s something else in that envelope, down in the corner.”

Tina turned the envelope up over her hand. A ring fell into her palm. It was the plain gold mounting my daddy bought in 1971, worn thin on the underside from fifty years of dishwater and garden dirt, and in the prongs where the diamond used to be there was a round piece of cut glass. In the light from the kitchen window it threw a little spark across the table just the same as it always had.

“That’s the mounting,” my mother said. “The gold is real and your daddy’s hands were on it, and the glass is glass. It’s for whichever of my girls asked for it first.

“Cindy, I know it wasn’t you. You never asked me for a thing in your life, and you’d have slept in that recliner another ten years and never brought up a ring. You get the recorder and the tapes and the route, and my thanks, which is a poor trade, and you have always been one to take a poor trade and make it look like a good one. There’s a side two on this tape. That’s yours. Turn it over when they’ve all gone home.

“And Tina. If it was you, and I’d bet my egg money it was, then put it on. I mean it. I said my girls and I meant girls, the both of you. You wanted my ring, and now you’ve got it, and you know what it cost. Wear it to the grocery. Wear it to church, if you’ll come back, and I wish you would. And the next time you get to thinking nobody ever gave you one thing, look down at your hand.”

She coughed, away from the microphone. I knew that cough.

“That’s all. Cindy’s car is in the drive. Somebody feed Mike. I love every one of you, the prickly ones too.”

There was a clunk, and then just the hiss, and then the button popped up by itself.

For a long time the only sound in that kitchen was the wall clock, by itself now.

Randy got up out of Dad’s chair. I thought he was going to walk out. He came around the table instead and put both arms around me, and my big brother, who is six foot two and has not hugged me since our father’s funeral, cried into the shoulder of my black dress.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “Cindy, I swear to you, I didn’t know. I thought it was the church too. I thought it was a mistake at the courthouse. I never asked. I was scared to ask.”

“I didn’t know either,” I said. “I counted her pills for fourteen months and I didn’t know.”

Tina had not moved. The ring was still lying in her open hand. She was looking at it the way you look at a bill.

Then she set it on the table and pushed it across the yellow top toward me with one finger.

“I can’t take that,” she said.

“She gave it to you.”