The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
Her left hand lay open on the blanket, small and spotted and a little curled. On the third finger, where the ring had been for seventy-one years, there was a band of pale skin narrower than a pencil, with a faint dent still pressed into it.
I stood there a long time, and I did not wake her. When the day shift came on I told Tess, and she went white, and soon everybody on that hall was going through the laundry bins for a ring the size of a grain of rice.
At nine o’clock Brandi drove in from Wichita. I had phoned her at seven. Sue had come over from Wilmer and was waiting in the lobby when she pulled in, a Kleenex in her fist.
Here is what I noticed. When I told Brandi the ring was gone, she said the right things in the right order, a half second too fast. “Oh no.” “Oh, Aunt Jeannie.” A hand over her mouth. Then she said, “Maybe it slipped off in the bed. She’s lost so much weight.”
It was not in the bed. It was not in the laundry, which had been searched twice. So between nine and ten-thirty I watched my niece walk herself, step by careful step, from “it slipped off” to “it must have been taken,” the way a person backs onto a road she would rather not be on. By the time we stood in Carolyn’s office she had a name she had never bothered to learn in all the weeks she hadn’t visited, and she said it clearly so Carolyn could write it down.
“Marguerite Pruitt had the most access. She’s the only one in that room when nobody’s watching.”
Sue sat by the window with her purse in her lap and said, “Honey, don’t get yourself worked up.”
And I stood in the doorway with my mother’s cardigan.
I will tell you the truth. I knew. Not the way you know a thing in court. I had no proof. But I had a pale stripe on a dying hand, and a forty-minute visit nobody saw, and a story that had changed three times in an hour. And I had one thing more, which I will come to.
Carolyn put Marguerite on leave that afternoon. It is policy: any report of missing property that names a staff member, you pull that person off the floor. Carolyn called her at home, and told me later, her voice cracking, that Marguerite didn’t argue or ask who said it. She said, “Is Miss Hazel all right?” and then, “Who’s going to turn her at two?”
That is what she asked. Before she asked about her job, with Josie’s winter coat still on layaway.
That Thursday night I sat with my mother in the dark. Teresa had come at nine and said her breathing had changed, and it would be a few days, perhaps less. Ray had gone home to feed the dog. I had a rosary in my pocket, though I’m Methodist, because Marguerite had pressed it into my hand weeks before. “It’s about having something to hold,” she said.
I was holding it when my mother opened her eyes.
They were clear. Not the milky, wandering gaze of the past three weeks, but gray and entirely her own, and she looked at me the way she used to over the kitchen table when I’d been caught in something.