The Gumball Ring at the Bursar’s Window

What Patrice wanted

I want to be fair to Patrice, because I was not always fair to her in my head that winter. She was forty-eight. She was a small, hard-working woman with her hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt.

She had never asked anybody for help in her life. She had been raised that you did not air your business, and you did not cry where people could see you, and you surely did not tell your daughter’s boyfriend that you were scared.

What she said, every time, was some version of the same thing. “Your brothers need you more than strangers in a hospital do. Nursing school will still be there in five years. They won’t be little in five years.”

What she did not say, and what we did not know yet, was everything else.

Emma went home every weekend anyway. She drove the twenty-five minutes down to Windsor on Friday after her last class and packed the boys’ lunches for the whole week, five brown sacks each, with their names on them in marker.

She did the laundry. She made a pan of goulash on Sunday so there would be suppers. She slept on the couch because her old room had become the place where the boxes from her dad went to sit, and then she drove back to Sedalia at four on Monday morning for clinicals.

I went with her a lot of those weekends. I fixed the latch on the storm door. I put new brake pads on Patrice’s car in the driveway while Owen handed me the tools in the wrong order and Sam asked me if welders could make a robot.

“Probably,” I said. “But it would be ugly.”

“I don’t care if it’s ugly,” Sam said, coughing into his elbow the way Emma had taught him. “I just want it to do my spelling.”

Patrice watched me from the kitchen window that day. When I came in to wash up, she handed me a towel and a glass of iced tea and said, “You’re a good boy, Caleb. Stay out of this one.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I did, for five months. It is the thing I am least proud of, and I have thought about it a lot. I should have sat down with her sooner, man to woman, and asked her what was really wrong.

The ring money

Now I need to tell you about the account at the credit union.

When I started at the shop, my dad sat me down at our kitchen table. My dad, Ron Fritz, is a pipefitter, thirty-one years in the union, and he talks about money the way some men talk about the weather. Plainly, and only when he has to.

“Every check,” he said, “you put something in a place where you can’t see it. I don’t care if it’s twenty dollars. You put it there and you forget it’s there until you need to build something.”

So I did. A hundred and fifty out of every check at first, and then two hundred once I got my first raise. By that March I had eleven thousand six hundred dollars sitting in an account I never touched.

I had told exactly one person what it was for. My mother, Marie, who guessed anyway, because mothers do.

“It’s for a ring,” I told her at Thanksgiving. “Not a crazy ring. A good one. I want to ask her when she finishes school, so she has that, and then this, in that order.”

My mom hugged me hard in front of the turkey and told me not to tell Emma, as if I would.

I had a picture in my head. Emma’s pinning ceremony in May, the little gold pin they put on the nurses’ collars, and then supper at the steakhouse out on the highway, and then a real ring. I had it all lined up like a weld bead. It was a good picture.