The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
I said, “Sue, what did Brandi do Wednesday afternoon?”
There was a very long pause.
“She sat with her grandmother,” my sister said, her voice going tight. “What are you suggesting?”
I could have said it.
But I had made my mother a promise with her pulse under my fingers. And I knew something I had learned from sixty years of being the dependable one: when you accuse a cornered person, they dig in. They have to.
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ll see you at the funeral.”
I hung up and told Ray at the kitchen table that I knew where the ring was. “Going to say?” he asked. “Not yet,” I said. “Mama asked me to wait.” He nodded slowly. “Your mother was a hard woman to say no to.” Then, because he is Ray, he got up and put the kettle on.
On Sunday I called Carolyn and told her, as I’d promised, that nobody on her staff had taken my mother’s ring, that I vouched for Marguerite Pruitt with everything I had, and that I’d put it in writing. Carolyn was quiet. “Jeannie, I can’t just drop it. The family filed a report with the state yesterday. It goes to an investigator now, and it has Marguerite’s name on it.”
I hadn’t known that. I sat down hard on the kitchen stool.
A complaint like that goes in a file, and the file can follow an aide for years. Marguerite was fifty-eight, with a granddaughter and a Buick. “She’s on paid leave,” Carolyn said. “I fought for that. But she can’t work anywhere in the system while it’s open.”
Then I called Marguerite. She picked up on the second ring, the same warm milk as always.
“Marguerite, I can’t tell you everything yet,” I said. “But nobody who knew my mother believes what’s being said about you. I need you at the funeral on Wednesday. Not as staff. As family.”
She was quiet a moment. “I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.”
“You’ll be at the front,” I said.
We buried my mother at the Wilmer Cemetery on Wednesday the eighteenth, on a bright, hard, windy afternoon, beside my father. Pastor Neil Overmyer read the Twenty-third Psalm, and the choir sang “In the Garden,” and I looked toward the back pew and saw Marguerite in a black dress let out at the seams, singing with her eyes closed.
Brandi stood by the grave in black, and she cried real tears. She loved her grandmother in her ragged way. She loved her enough to take a ring off a dying hand, and that is the sad, true part of it.
Afterward the Methodist women laid out the luncheon in the fellowship hall, the way they have for every funeral since 1938. Ham and potato salad and seven kinds of pie on long tables covered in white paper. Ninety people, farmers and their wives, old men who had worked beside my father at the elevator.
Marguerite stood by the kitchen door with her purse in both hands, not sitting anywhere. I had a place for her in mind, but I was across the room helping Pastor Neil’s wife with a pan of rolls when I heard a spoon against a glass.
It was Brandi.
She stood at the head table tapping a tea glass with her fork, and the room turned toward her like a field of sunflowers. Sue sat beside her, eyes on her plate. She knew what was coming. She had not stopped it.