A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

That was how it started. I did not ask anyone to come along. I knocked on the first door, a woman in a housecoat watering her mums at number 12, and said I was sorry to bother her, and asked whether she had seen a woman in a tan sweater with a tote bag. Before the woman could answer, Trudy said, “It’s Dee Chandler’s daughter. They buried Dee this morning.” And the woman put down the hose.

“Is this about the ring?” she said. “Somebody said something.”

By then I understood that the street already knew. Walnut Street has never kept a secret for longer than a Tuesday. Everyone who had walked across that porch that day had seen the price stickers on my mother’s rolling pin and her Pyrex bowls, and half of them had known whose they were. And they had bought them anyway, because it was Rummage Day and nobody wanted to be the one to say it.

I do not blame them for that. Most of them looked sick about it.

“I bought her bread bowl,” the woman in the housecoat said. “Two dollars. Deana told me Dee wanted it cleared out.” She wiped her hands. “I’m going to go get it.”

“It can wait,” I said.

“It most certainly cannot.”

She went inside, and she came back out with a yellow mixing bowl in both hands, the one my mother had made every one of my birthday cakes in, and she held it to her chest like a baby. I took it. Mike came up behind me and carried it back to the truck without a word.

Cliff Amsler

At the third house a man in a John Deere cap came out onto his porch, a big, stooped man in his eighties with a cane and hands like shovels. I knew him. Everyone did. Cliff Amsler had farmed south of town for fifty years, and after his wife Hattie died he had gotten so quiet that the church worried about him.

“Janet,” he said. He looked at the photograph and set his jaw. “I saw her. I was out here with my tomato stakes and she stopped at my table. Little woman. Tan sweater. Walks with a cane, carries one of those quilted tote bags.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“She asked me where the Legion hall was. The auxiliary does a bake sale there on Rummage Day.” He turned his cap around in his hands. “I’ll walk down with you.”

“Mr. Amsler, you don’t need to.”

“Janet.” He looked at me with those old watery blue eyes. “For two years after Hattie passed, your mother brought a casserole to my back door every Wednesday. Chicken and noodles, ham and potatoes, whatever she had. She would knock, put it on the step, and walk away before I got there. She never once stayed to be thanked.” His voice thickened. “I figured out it was her in about the second month. I never said anything. I figured she didn’t want it said.”

He put his cap on his head.