The Gumball Ring at the Bursar’s Window

May

Emma’s pinning ceremony was the second Friday in May at the community college auditorium. Thirty-one nurses in white walked across the stage, one at a time, and their families came up and pinned them.

Patrice pinned her. She asked Emma if she could, and Emma said yes, and they both cried so hard on the stage that the dean had to hand them a tissue box.

Lorraine from the business office was there. I don’t know how she knew. She sat in the back row by herself, and when Emma walked across, she stood up again, the way she did in that hallway.

Afterward, in the lobby, she found us. She hugged Emma and shook my hand.

“I’ve worked that window twenty-six years,” Lorraine said. “I don’t remember most of the people who come through it. I’ll remember you two until I die.”

A real ring

I bought the real ring in August, after I turned journeyman and got my raise. My dad helped me pick it out. It is not a big ring. It is a plain gold band with one small stone, and it fits all the way down past her knuckle.

I gave it to her on her mother’s porch in Windsor, with the boys hanging off the railing and Patrice inside pretending not to watch through the kitchen window.

Emma put it on and looked at it for a long time. Then she said thank you, and kissed me, and went inside to get her badge reel, and showed me that the gumball ring was still on it.

“This one stays at work,” she said, holding up the reel. “That one stays home. That’s the order.”

We got married in October at her grandmother’s church in Windsor. Sam carried the rings. He asked, out loud, in the middle of the vows, where the gumball one was. Half the church laughed. Patrice laughed hardest.

Now

Emma works nights on the medical floor now, three twelves a week. Patrice is still on three nights at the plant, and my mother still keeps the boys every Wednesday whether anybody needs her to or not.

Patrice paid me back. Not all at once. Twenty-five dollars at a time, in an envelope tucked under the windshield wiper of my truck every other Friday, with no note. I put every one of them in the account at the credit union. I have not touched it. Dad was right. You keep something in a place you cannot see.

Some mornings I still pick Emma up after her shift. She comes out the hospital doors at seven fifteen, tired, her hair coming loose, her navy scrubs wrinkled from twelve hours of running.

She has a real ring on her finger, a gold one that fits.

And clipped to the pocket of her scrubs, swinging a little when she walks, there is a plastic ring on a nurse’s badge reel.