A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

At four o’clock my feet hurt so badly that I had taken off my funeral pumps and was walking in my stockings. Mike pulled the truck up at the corner of Maple and I got in and shut the door and put my forehead against the dashboard.

“Maybe she’s gone home,” I said. “Maybe she drove to Osceola and I’ll never find her. Maybe I’m the one who is being foolish, Mike. It’s five dollars. It’s a ring.”

“It’s not a ring,” Mike said. “It’s your mother.”

He did not say it with any flourish. Mike works on heating and air conditioning for a living, and he talks about people the way he talks about ducts. He tells you where the air isn’t moving.

I breathed. Then I put my pumps back on.

“Call the Auxiliary,” he said. “She knew where to find them once. Maybe she went back.”

I had never thought of it. I called the Legion hall from my cell phone, and Bessie Langley picked up on the second ring.

“Honey,” she said. “I was just about to call somebody. She’s here. She came back about twenty minutes ago. She’s been sitting at the card table by the coffee urn with that bag in her lap, asking if anyone knows how to reach the Chandler family without upsetting them. Nobody had your number. Come now.”

The Legion Hall

Five of us came through the door of the Legion hall: Mike, Trudy, Cliff Amsler, Abby, and me. Abby had chained her bicycle to the flagpole behind us. Over by the coffee urn, at a card table, sat a small woman in a tan cardigan with a cane hooked over the back of her chair and a quilted tote bag in her lap.

I knew it was her before I saw her face. I cannot tell you how. Maybe it was the way she was sitting, very upright, with both hands on that bag, like a person guarding something.

She looked up. She did not look afraid. She looked, if anything, relieved.

I held out the photograph. My hand was shaking. “Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you. I think you bought a coffee can of costume jewelry off a porch on Walnut Street this afternoon.”

She looked at the picture for a long time. She looked at my mother’s thin hand, the ring turned toward the camera, my hand under it.

Then she looked at me.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Sit down. I’ve been looking for you since two o’clock.”