The Class Ring in the Nursing Home Hallway

Dorrie is fifty-two. She married Darrel Tiedeman when she was twenty, and they have one boy, Callan, who was graduating the same week as Darby. Same class. Same gym. Twenty names apart in the alphabet.

Darrel works for an oil field service outfit out of Carmi. That spring the work slowed down and his hours got cut almost in half.

I knew that too. Everybody at church knew it. Dorrie had picked up shifts at the dollar store to cover it.

I am telling you all of this first because I want you to understand that my sister is not a bad woman.

She is a tired one. That is a different thing, and it matters to what happened.

That Sunday, after Dorrie drove off, Darby got into the truck and buckled her seatbelt and looked straight out the windshield.

Jill climbed in on the other side and looked at me over the top of Darby’s head.

“Well,” Jill said quietly.

“It’s fine, Mom,” Darby said. “Grandpa’s on a fixed income. The home costs a fortune. I don’t need anything. I really don’t.”

Nobody said anything else on the way home. Jill made pot roast like she does every Sunday.

Darby ate a little and then went to her room to work on her thank you notes for the cards she had already gotten from church people.

That would have been the end of it. I would have let it go, and Darby would have let it go, because that is how she is.

She lets things go so other people don’t have to feel bad.

Then the Thursday before graduation, the seniors had practice in the gym. They walked the line and learned where to sit and practiced turning their tassels.

Darby came home from it and went straight to her room and shut the door.

Jill knocked and went in. She was in there twenty minutes. When she came out to the kitchen, where I was eating a sandwich standing up at the counter, her face was set in a way I had not seen in a long time.

“Callan was sitting next to her in the bleachers,” she said. “One of the other boys asked what everybody was getting for graduation. Callan said his grandpa gave him five thousand dollars for a truck.”

I put the sandwich down.

“He wasn’t bragging,” Jill said. “Darby said he wasn’t bragging. He just said it. He didn’t know what Dorrie told her. Then he looked at Darby and his face went red and he didn’t say anything else the rest of practice.”

Five thousand dollars. Out of my father’s account. Given to one grandchild, three weeks after the other one was told there was nothing.

“Call your sister,” Jill said. “Tonight. I mean it, Burke.”

I want to be honest about what I thought, standing there in my kitchen. I thought about calling Dorrie.

I thought about the words I would use. Some of them were not words I would say in front of my daughter.

Then I thought about my father.

It was his money. Not Dorrie’s, not mine. He was eighty-eight, but he was as sharp as the day he quit farming.

If something was wrong with his money, he could fix it himself, once he knew. He did not need his son and daughter yelling over his head.

And I knew exactly how it would go if I called Dorrie. She would cry and say I never helped. I would say things about the five thousand.