The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
And I saw Marguerite Pruitt, who had every right on God’s green earth to shut that door, bend and lift her up, and wrap her arms all the way around her, rocking a little, the way you hold a child who has had a terrible dream.
“Honey, I knew something was bent in you. I didn’t know it was this. Come inside. Josie’s got pancakes going.”
Brandi offered to pay for the shifts Marguerite had lost, four hundred and sixty dollars folded in an envelope. Marguerite wouldn’t take a penny. “Put it toward the Manor’s activity fund,” she said. “The residents have wanted a bird feeder for the dayroom window since Christmas.”
They bought it together that Saturday. It hangs there now, with a little brass plate on the post: For Hazel Whitcomb, from the girls on the night hall. Brandi had it engraved herself.
My sister Sue came to my house on Friday evening without calling first.
She stood on the porch with her purse held in front of her like a shield, and no makeup on. In sixty-four years I had not seen my sister without her face on, and it startled me how much she looked like our mother.
“I knew,” Sue said. “I knew on Wednesday night. Brandi called me from the road and told me what she’d done. And I said, ‘Hush. She won’t miss it. Jeannie’s got everything else.'” Her chin trembled. “For three days I let her say all that about that poor woman, and I sat at the table and let her.”
“Come in, Sue.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Then you can just come in. I’ve got coffee on.”
We sat at my kitchen table, two old women across an oilcloth, the way we had sat as girls. She told me she had always been jealous of me. Not of the casseroles, but of being the one they looked to. “I taught Brandi to be charming because I never learned to be anything else,” she said. “I was afraid for both of us, and I handed her my fear and called it advice.”
I told her I had resented being the strong one, and that I’d been proud when Mama named me, and ashamed of being proud.
“It was always yours,” she said.
“Our mother promised it twice, Sue. That’s what started all this.”
She laughed, and cried, and laughed again. When she left, she hugged me on the porch a long time, the way we hadn’t since Daddy’s funeral, and I felt how small she was.
I kept the ring. Mama had been plain, and I don’t think a promise should be unmade because someone else wanted what you were given. For the first month I kept it in the cedar chest in the spare room, on top of the quilts that now belong to Brandi, which she carried out herself one slow armful at a time. I couldn’t wear it yet. It felt like a thing that had been through a war.
Brandi started coming to Wilmer on Sundays that spring. I would find her at the Manor in the dayroom in her jeans, reading the Weekly aloud to residents who couldn’t see well enough to read it themselves, sitting beside Marguerite at the long table. Marguerite was back on nights by then. The state had closed the file within three weeks, complaint withdrawn, property recovered. At the nurses’ station somebody had taped up a Welcome back card beside Josie’s school picture.