The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
Nobody said it out loud. It was just the shape of things. Sue got the compliments and I got the casseroles to carry.
When Mama’s hip went in the fall of ’19, it was my phone that rang at two in the morning. When her memory started to fray, and last June the doctor said she couldn’t live alone anymore, it was my car that made the twelve-mile drive to the Manor every afternoon at four. Sue came on Sundays, when she came. Brandi came at Christmas.
When my mother said the ring was mine, it was the first time in sixty years anyone had said out loud which daughter was which, and said it in my favor.
I should have known a thing said in front of a whole dayroom would travel.
By the second week of March, the doctor stopped saying “if” and began saying “when.” The hospice nurse, a brisk, kind woman named Teresa, told us Mama’s heart was tired. She did not say failing. She said tired, like a good horse at the end of a long field.
I moved a recliner into Room 14.
The night aide on that hall was Marguerite Pruitt, and you ought to know who she is. She was fifty-eight, a widow, a big-boned, soft-voiced woman who drove a Buick with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. She was raising her granddaughter Josie, who was eleven and whose mother was not in the picture. Marguerite had turned my mother every two hours through nine months of nights. She sang to her, quietly, when Mama couldn’t sleep. “In the Garden.” “Blessed Assurance.” She had a voice like warm milk.
Mama called her “my Marguerite.” When Mama couldn’t remember my name, she remembered Marguerite’s.
On Tuesday evening, the tenth, at a quarter past eight, I kissed my mother’s forehead. The lamp was low. Her hands were folded on the quilt, and there was the ring, thin and cloudy and gold, on her left hand where it had been since Eisenhower.
“Goodnight, Mama.”
“Mm,” she said, with her eyes shut. “Tell Orville I’ll be along.”
On Wednesday the eleventh I had a blood pressure check in Hutchinson that I’d put off, and Ray insisted I go. I left Mama at noon with the day aide, a nice girl named Tess, and told Mama I’d be back by four.
At two o’clock my niece Brandi walked into Room 14.
I know because Tess told me. She had no reason to think a thing of it. It was the granddaughter, in her work scrubs, who had driven ninety minutes on her lunch break, looking sweet and sad and a little pale. She asked for a few minutes alone with Grandma. Tess pulled the door to, and Brandi stayed forty minutes.
She had not been to the Manor in seven weeks.
When I got back at ten past four, Mama was sleeping the heavy, open-mouthed sleep that came with the morphine, and Brandi’s car was gone. In the visitors’ book she’d written Love you Grandma, Brandi, with a heart.
I did not look at my mother’s hands that evening. I did not think to. I turned off the lamp at nine and slept in the recliner, and at twenty to six on Thursday I got up and washed my face and bent to straighten the quilt, and that was when I saw it.