A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

Number one. My father was thirty feet from me, sitting in a folding chair with his brother Vaughn, holding a coffee cup in both hands. He is seventy-four years old. He had just stood at the grave of the first woman he ever loved, and he was not holding up well. His hearing aids were whistling in the quiet and he had not heard a word of what Deana said. I looked at him and I thought, I am not going to hand him this today. If I told him in that room, I knew what he would do, and I knew he could not take it back.

Number two. The obvious fix was not available. People always say, “Why didn’t you just tell her to call the woman and get it back?” Because Deana did not know who the woman was. She had two hundred people across that porch on Rummage Day, the first Saturday in October, when the whole town puts its attic out on the lawn. Colleen’s notebook had a line for every sale, what sold and for how much, and the line for the can said only “can, jewelry, $5.” No name. And to the other suggestion, the sheriff: I knew exactly how that would go. A deputy in a county this small would call it a family matter, and he would not be wrong. Deana had used a key that hung in my father’s own kitchen. Nobody broke in. There was no thief to arrest, only a woman with a cash box and a bad reason.

Number three. I was raised by Dee Chandler. My mother once drove a pie across town in an ice storm to a woman who had been unkind to her at a church council meeting, and when I asked her why, she said, “Because I was raised to know better than the other person.” I was in my black dress, with her funeral program on the table. I was not going to scream at anybody across a plate of casseroles in front of her people.

But I was going to get that ring.

The Photograph

My mother wore her wedding ring for twenty-four years and then she took it off. The day she moved into the little house on Cedar Street, in 1998, she set it in a blue saucer on the kitchen windowsill and left it there. She never sold it and never wore it again. When I asked her once why she kept it, she said, “Because your father gave it to me before he turned into a man I had to forgive. I like to remember he was good once.”

It was a plain fourteen karat band with a chip of a diamond. Inside, in tiny letters, it said L to D 6-14-74.

Three weeks before she died, when she could still sit up against the pillows, she asked me to bring her the saucer. She slid the ring on her finger. It was loose by then, because she had lost so much weight, and I had to hold her hand closed around it. She held it up to the window light.

“Take my picture, Janie,” she said.