A Photograph and a Five Dollar Ring

The Porch

Mike had stepped outside while I was still sitting with Becky. I found out later what he was doing. He had called my father, who had left his brother Vaughn at the church and walked the six blocks home in his good shoes, and found Colleen in the kitchen with the spiral notebook, and asked her for it.

By five o’clock, when we turned onto Walnut Street, the street had gone back to its ordinary Saturday. The folding tables were gone. My father was sitting on the top step of his porch in his black funeral suit, with his tie loosened and his hearing aids in. In one hand he held the cash box. In the other he held Colleen’s notebook, open to a page of ones and fives in a column.

I stopped at the bottom of the walk. Mike stayed beside me. Next door, Trudy and Ernest had come out on their own porch and were pretending to look at the mums.

I did not say anything. I opened my hand and showed him what was in it.

My father looked at the ring for what felt like a very long time. His mouth moved once.

Then he set the cash box on the porch rail and he said, in the plain steady voice he used to use at five in the morning on Cedar Street, “Deana. Come out here.”

She came out through the screen door. She had taken off the apron. She looked, for the first time in the twenty-three years I had known her, like a woman who did not know where to put her hands.

“Tell me about the can,” he said.

“Lew, it was only…”

“Tell me about the can, Deana.”

She looked at the walk. She was very pale. For a moment I thought she might defend herself, and a part of me wanted her to. I had carried that fight for four hours.

Instead she said, in a small voice, “It’s her house, Lew. In everything but the deed. It’s got her walk shoveled. It’s got her pie plate in my cupboard because you wouldn’t let me throw it out. I wanted one thing in this house to be mine.”

My father looked at her as if she were someone he had known for a very long time. Because she was.

“Dee asked me every Christmas whether you were happy,” he said. “Every one. She never said a word against you.”

Deana sat down on the step below him.

“That ring was a promise I made when I was twenty-two and broke,” he said. “I’ve been trying to pay it back with a snow shovel for twenty-seven years, and you let me, and I never once asked what it cost you. That is mine to carry. But it wasn’t yours to sell. It wasn’t mine, either. It was Janet’s, and you knew that.”

“I know,” she said.

“Colleen is expecting you tonight. I need the house quiet for a few days. I love you. That hasn’t changed. I just can’t sleep in this house tonight with this on the counter.” He tore the page out of the notebook and put it in her hand. “In the morning you’re going to take this down the street and give back every dollar and take back what’s left of that kitchen. Trudy knows who bought what. Ask her to walk with you.”

I had expected to enjoy that moment. I had been rehearsing it all afternoon in my head. What I felt, standing at the bottom of my father’s walk, was grief. Plain grief for all three of us, and for the quiet woman buried that morning on the hill, who would have hated every second of it.

Deana went upstairs and came down with a small suitcase. She did not look at me. My father carried it to her car and put it in the back seat, and then he stood in his own driveway for a good while after she had gone.