The Ring My Son Pulled From the Lake

I was too busy holding a wet fourteen-year-old who was trying very hard not to cry in front of his cousins.

Neva walked over and put a hand on my back. She did not say anything about her son. She just said, “Bring him up to the house and get him in a hot shower,” and I did.

I should tell you who we were, because nobody at that party would have guessed this was coming, least of all me.

I married Gilbert Holm when I was eighteen and he was twenty. Gunnar was already on the way.

We were broke the way only kids in Little Falls with a baby coming are broke, and we got married in my parents’ backyard with a sheet cake from the grocery store.

We bought our rings at the mall in St. Cloud. Mine was a thin gold band, the only real gold we could afford.

His was tungsten carbide, gray and heavy, eighty dollars, because the man at the counter said it would never scratch.

I went to the technical college in Wadena for welding when Gunnar was two. Gilbert took nights so I could go. I want that on the record too. For a long time we were a good team.

These days I weld at a trailer plant in Little Falls. Utility trailers, livestock trailers, the occasional pontoon trailer. I have been there nine years, and I am one of three women on the floor.

Gilbert sold farm equipment at a dealership outside Little Falls. He was good at it.

He could talk to any farmer in Morrison County about a combine for an hour, and I always thought it was funny, because at home he could barely talk about anything.

That was the thing about Gilbert. He could say anything easy. Weather, hockey, fertilizer prices. Anything hard, he would go out to the garage and fix something that was not broken.

That night I lay awake in the bunk room at Neva’s with Gunnar asleep in the bunk under me.

I could hear the loons. I kept thinking about the ring going into the water and how small the sound was.

Around two in the morning I got up and went out and sat on the porch steps.

Neva was already out there in her robe. She had a mug of coffee for herself and she had poured one for me without asking.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” she said.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I told her.

“I raised him to say hard things out loud,” she said. “His father was like that. You knew where you stood with Hector every minute of the day. I don’t know where Gilbert lost that.”

I did not answer, because I did not know either.

We sat there until it started to get gray over the lake. Then she said, “Gunnar’s going to want that ring back. He’s going to want to go back in after it.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’ll not have him diving off that dock alone,” she said. “You understand me.”

“He won’t be alone,” I said.

At seven I called a dive service out of Brainerd. The man was nice. He said he did ring recoveries all summer, mostly wedding rings off pontoons.

He wanted three hundred fifty dollars, and the soonest he could come up was two weeks out.

“Two weeks in muck like that,” he said, “it’s going to settle. I’ll still try. I’ve found them a foot down. But I’m not going to promise you anything.”