What Mom Left in the Cedar Box

“I went through her dresser, Cindy.” Her chin was shaking. “The day after. She wasn’t even at the funeral home yet and I was in her top drawer. I told my son to wait in the car.”

“I know you did.”

“I stood up in that church and told sixty people she never gave us anything.”

“I know. I was holding the plates.”

“So you take it. You earned it. I didn’t come but twice.”

I looked at that ring. I wanted it. My father’s thumbprint was worn into that gold, and my mother’s knuckle. For about the length of one breath I thought about how easy it would be to close my hand over it and let Tina walk out of that house feeling exactly as small as she had tried to make me feel beside the dessert table.

But I had just listened to my mother give away the best thing she owned and ask for nothing, and I could not do the opposite at her own kitchen table.

I pushed the ring back.

“She said whoever asked first,” I said. “You asked first. You asked second and third, too. Those were her instructions, and I’ve followed every one she ever gave me, and I’m not going to quit today.”

“Cindy.”

“Put it on, Tina. She said she meant it.”

My sister-in-law picked up the ring. She did not put it on her left hand, where she’d had her fingers spread half an hour before. She slid it onto the ring finger of her right hand. It was a little big. Mom’s hands were bigger than hers.

Then Tina did the thing I had not seen her do in twenty-eight years. She got up, and she walked around the table to my mother’s empty chair by the stove, and she put both hands on the back of it, and she bowed her head and stood there.

“I’m sorry, Dorothy,” she said. “Thank you for the furnace.”

It was such a plain thing to say. It was two winters late. I think Mom heard it anyway.

Somebody did feed Mike. I warmed up the ham.

The funeral was on a Thursday. That Sunday I went to church by myself, because Dale had a delivery route to make up, and I sat in the third pew because I could not stand to see it empty. I had Mom’s recorder in my purse. I set it on the hymnal rack and pushed the two buttons down together the way she showed me when I was twelve.

About a minute before the first hymn, somebody slid into the pew next to me. It was Tina. She had on a navy dress and no coat. Randy was behind her, and Kyle behind him. It was the first time I had seen the three of them in that building together in close to two years.

She didn’t say anything. She just held her right hand out flat on her knee where I could see the glass.

After the service there was coffee in the fellowship hall, same as every week. Same room, same folding tables, the mums from Thursday starting to droop in their jars. Brenda was at the urn. So were the two ladies from Mom’s circle who had heard all about the diamond three days before.

Brenda saw the ring before she saw anything else.

“Well,” she said. Her voice could have frosted a window. “I see you got it.”

“I did,” Tina said.

And then my sister-in-law, who would rather sleep by an open oven than let one soul in that town know her business, set down her coffee and spoke up so the whole end of the hall could hear.