The Ring on Her Good Tablecloth

So I did not. I sat there with my hands around my cup and listened to boots coming through the store, past the jerky and the trucker caps, heavy work boots on the tile floor, and I knew the walk before I ever saw him.

Brent came around the end of the counter and stopped by our booth. He was still in his work coveralls, the navy ones with the shop name on the pocket.

There was grease to his elbows and a red line across his forehead from his cap.

He did not say anything at first. He looked at Dylan, and then at me, and then at the two empty pie plates.

Then he slid into the booth next to Dylan, not next to me, and set his elbows on the table.

“Patty,” he called over, “could I get a coffee when you get a second?” Patty was already coming with the pot. She poured him a cup and set it in front of him and went away again without a word.

Brent reached into the chest pocket of his coveralls. He took out my ring and set it on the table, and slid it slowly across the Formica toward me with one finger until it stopped by my cup.

“You left this at Mom’s,” he said.

I did not pick it up. I looked at it. “I know,” I said. “I meant to.”

“I know you meant to.” He wrapped both hands around his coffee. His knuckles were split from the cold. “I got back about a quarter to seven. Everybody was still sitting there. Nobody’d hardly eaten. And that was in the middle of the table.”

He looked at Dylan. “Brynn told me. She met me at the back door before I even got my boots off. She said, Dad, Grandma put Dylan in the kitchen at a card table, and she gave us a hundred dollars and gave him five, and Kristy took her ring off and left.”

Dylan looked down at his hands. Brent went on. “Then she said, and I want you to know this, bud, she said, I put my envelope on the card table. He can have mine. And she did. It’s still sitting there. She wouldn’t pick it back up.”

Dylan’s ears went red. “She didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“No,” Brent said. “She didn’t. That’s how you know she meant it.” He turned his coffee cup around once on the table. “Then I went in the dining room and I asked my mother what in the world she was thinking.”

“What did she say?” I asked. It was the first real thing I had said to him.

“Not much, at first. She said it was her table. And I said, Mom, it’s my family, and it’s going to be my table too, every Christmas from now on, and I’ll set it with a card table for whoever you’d put there.”

He did not raise his voice telling it. I believed he had not raised it then either.

Brent was never a yeller. He just set things down where they belonged and left them there.

“Gina backed me up,” he said. “Glen, too. Glen said, Marilyn, I’ve known that boy two years and he’s never once been anything but polite to you. And then nobody said anything for a while, and then Mom got up and went and got her coat.”

He nodded toward the front windows, toward the lot. “She’s out in the truck. She wants to come in. I told her I’d ask first.” He looked at me, and then he looked at Dylan. “I’m asking you both. It’s your table.”