A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

I took one with my phone and printed it at the drugstore the next day. It showed her hand in mine, thin as a bird’s, with the ring turned toward the camera. When I put it in the frame on the memory table at the funeral, next to her Bible and her church directory, it was the picture that stopped people in their tracks.

I remember what she said when she took the ring off again and set it back in the saucer. “Don’t bury me in it. It’s yours. Wear it on your thumb if it won’t fit your finger.” I told her I’d take it home after the funeral. I said it as if there were all the time in the world, and I have thought about that sentence more than any other thing I said to her.

Now I walked across the fellowship hall, past forty people who had all gone quiet, and I picked that photograph up off the memory table. I slid it out of the frame and held it in my hand.

My husband Mike was waiting by the door. He has been married to me for twenty-six years and he knows my face. He did not say a word. He took one look at the photograph and one look at the cash box and went for the truck.

“You want me to talk to her?” he said, once we were outside.

“No.”

“You want me to call your dad?”

“Not yet.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to drive down Walnut Street very slowly with the flashers on,” I said, “and knock on every door.”

He nodded as if I had asked for the salt.

Walnut Street

By two o’clock Rummage Day was winding down, but Walnut Street still looked like an auction. Folding tables on every lawn, boxes of paperbacks and chipped crockery, a rack of men’s flannel shirts, three card tables of canning jars. My father’s house was the third from the corner. His porch was almost bare now. Colleen was folding the last table, and she looked up and saw me in the truck’s window, and she found something very interesting to do with a box of Tupperware.

Trudy Hendry had ridden over from the church with her husband Ernest right behind us, and now she was waiting on her own porch steps. She stood up when I got out.

“Janet. Honey. I should have stopped it.”

“You came and told me,” I said. “That’s what mattered.”

I held out the photograph. “I’m looking for a woman in a tan sweater who bought a coffee can of costume jewelry off my father’s porch. Did you see her?”

Trudy studied it. Then she looked at my black dress, and I watched her put it together.

“That’s the ring.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Dee,” she said, to nobody. She took my elbow. “Ernest, get your cap. We’re going with her.”