The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
Then Pastor Neil, bless him, cleared his throat and said, “Let us bow our heads and give thanks for this food, and for Hazel Whitcomb, and for every hand that ever held hers.”
Ninety heads went down. In the quiet, I heard my niece sit.
She left after dessert without a word, Sue hurrying after her. Marguerite stayed through the whole luncheon, and at the end she stood to help clear, and I said, “No, ma’am, you sit,” and for the first time that week she laughed, a short, startled laugh, and sat.
At twenty to seven the next morning I came out onto my back step in my robe with my coffee, and my niece was sitting on it, still in her black dress, creased from a night in her car, mascara smeared across one cheekbone.
“I read it at three this morning,” she said, not looking up. “In the church parking lot, under the light. About ten times.”
I sat beside her. The wind was working the wheat across the road, and a meadowlark was going on somewhere in the fence line as if nothing had ever gone wrong in the world.
“I had it on a chain around my neck the whole funeral,” Brandi said. “Under my dress. The whole time they sang. The whole time I was standing up there saying those things about that woman.” She laughed, awful and wet. “I could feel it against my collarbone. Like a coal.”
She unclasped a thin silver chain and drew it out from her collar. Threaded on it was a thin gold band worn nearly to a wire on one side, with a diamond chip you could mistake for a grain of salt.
She held it out in her two cupped hands. In her own two hands, exactly as my mother had said.
“I took it off her finger. She was asleep. I drove up there to ask her, I swear I did. And she was so little, and I looked at her hand and thought, nobody’s ever going to give this to me. They already gave it to Aunt Jeannie.” She was shaking. “Grandma told me it was mine. On the porch swing. I was nine and I’ve believed it my whole life. Then Mom said at Christmas that she’d given it to you, and I just…”
“You thought she’d taken it back.”
“I thought I didn’t matter.” Her voice broke clean in half. “I thought I was the one nobody saved anything for.”
I didn’t reach for the ring. Not yet. I put my hand over both of hers, ring and all.
“Read me the letter.”
Her hands were so unsteady I steadied them. And with the meadowlark going and the wheat bending, my niece read me what my mother had written in February, on a day she’d told the pastor’s wife it was a grocery list.
Brandi Lynn,
If you are reading this, I am gone, and Jeannie has had the courage I never did to put it in your hand.
I made you a promise on my porch swing in the summer of 2001. You had lost your front tooth and were crying, and I put my wedding ring in your palm and said it would be yours someday. I meant every word. Then I got old and forgot, and I made the same promise to your Aunt Jeannie, who was the one who came.
That is my fault. Not yours, not hers. An old woman who promises one thing to two people has only herself to blame, and I should have told you to your face. I was a coward about it, and I am sorry.