A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

Deana came through the fellowship hall door at ten minutes to two with a metal cash box under one arm and her apron pockets stuffed with ones and fives.

She had slipped out of the lunch at twenty to one. “Ten minutes,” she had told my father, “just to check on the porch, it’s Rummage Day.” Then she had spent the better part of an hour on the front porch of the house she shared with my father, selling off my mother’s kitchen to anyone who had a dollar.

I was standing by the coffee urn with a paper plate of Vera Lindquist’s ham salad that I had not eaten a bite of. My mother had been in the ground for two hours. The hall still smelled like lilies and scalloped potatoes, and the long tables were full of people from the church, the Legion, the co-op, and the beauty shop where my mother had gotten her hair set every other Friday for thirty years.

“Janet, you look pale,” Deana said. “Sit down. You’ve been on your feet all day.”

She set the cash box on the end of the dessert table, between the lemon bars and the funeral program someone had left. Then she reached into her canvas tote and took out a small blue saucer with a chip on the rim.

It was my mother’s saucer. It had sat on her kitchen windowsill, over the sink, for twenty-eight years. A yellow price sticker was stuck to the bottom of it. Fifty cents.

“Where is what was in it?” I said.

Trudy Hendry, who lives next door to my father, had leaned in and whispered the whole thing in my ear ten minutes earlier, so I already knew. I wanted to hear Deana say it. I did not say it loud, either. I said it the way you ask a clerk where the bread is.

Deana did not pretend. I will give her that. She looked at the saucer and she looked at me and she said, “That junk off Dee’s windowsill? It went in a coffee can with the costume jewelry. Five dollars for the whole can. A woman in a tan sweater took it.”

“There was a ring in that saucer.”

“Janet.” She said my name the way you say it to a child who has dropped something at the grocery store. “It was a ring. Your mother is gone. Things are things.”

Then she took out her ones and started to count them, right there on the dessert table, with my mother’s funeral program lying next to her elbow.

That was the cruelest thing anyone has ever done in front of me. It was not the screaming kind of cruel. It was the counting kind.

Everyone I have told asks why I did not make a scene. A few ask it kindly, and a few are disappointed in me. I will answer that now, and then I will tell it straight.