The Gumball Ring at the Bursar’s Window

The form

After supper, Patrice got up from the table and went down the hall. She came back with her reading glasses and her tax folder and her own laptop, the old one with the cracked corner.

“Will you show me how to do it?” she asked Emma. “My part. For next year. I know you won’t need it if you finish in May. But in case you go on for your bachelor’s. Or in case Owen does someday.”

Emma opened the laptop. Patrice sat beside her, and the two of them went through the screens together, slow, line by line, Patrice reading the numbers off her W-2 in that careful voice people use for numbers.

It took fifteen minutes. That is all it ever would have taken.

When she typed in her signature, Patrice took her glasses off and wiped her eyes again.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said. “Five months, and it was fifteen minutes.”

“It wasn’t the form, Mom,” Emma said. “It was never the form.”

Then Patrice turned in her chair and looked at me. She took a long time to do it.

“You spent your ring money,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“On my daughter’s bill. That I should have helped her pay.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I don’t have it,” she said. “I want to tell you I’ll pay you back, and I don’t have it. Not right now.”

“I didn’t do it to get paid back,” I said. “I did it because I want to marry a nurse.”

Patrice nodded. Her chin was shaking.

“You stayed out of it like I told you,” she said. “For five months. I’m sorry I told you that.”

“I’m sorry I listened,” I said. And I meant it.

The rest of the spring

My mother kept the boys three nights a week starting that Monday. She bought bunk beds at a farm auction for forty dollars and put them in my old room. She made Owen read to her every night, and by May he had moved up a reading group.

She took Sam to the doctor herself on a Tuesday afternoon, with Patrice’s permission and Patrice on speakerphone. It was walking pneumonia, the kind that hangs on. Ten days of antibiotics, and the cough was gone by Easter.

Patrice slept. That is the plain truth of it. She went to three nights a week and she slept, and she started looking like a woman of forty-eight instead of a woman of seventy.

Emma finished her clinical hours on the medical floor at the hospital. She passed every check-off. She got a job offer from the same floor before she had even sat for boards.

The badge reel

There is one thing I have not told you yet. It is the thing I love most, so I saved it.

In clinicals, the nursing students are not allowed to wear rings. It is an infection control rule. No rings, no bracelets, nails short and plain. Rings hold germs under them, and rings tear gloves.

So the day after I proposed, Emma took Sam’s gumball ring off her finger before her shift. I watched her standing by her car in the dark at five in the morning, turning it over in her fingers, trying to decide what to do with it.

Then she unclipped her badge reel, the little plastic spool that her hospital ID hangs on, and she threaded the gumball ring onto the clip. She clipped the reel back onto the pocket of her navy scrubs.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s at work with me.”

She wore it like that every shift through the end of the spring. The older nurses on the floor asked about it. The patients asked about it. An old farmer from Cole Camp who was in for his heart asked her about it, and she told him the whole story while she was checking his IV.

“He proposed with a gumball ring?” the old man said.

“At the business office,” Emma said. “In front of the line.”

The old man laughed until the monitor beeped at him. “Honey,” he said, “you hang on to that boy. My wife and I got married on forty dollars and a borrowed suit, and we did fifty-one years.”