The Ring My Son Pulled From the Lake

The whole family was watching. Neva had her hand over her mouth again, but this time for a different reason. Hayden set his fork down.

“It’s your dad’s ring,” I said. “You should think about that.”

“He threw it away,” Gunnar said. “I didn’t.”

I did not have anything to say to that. Nobody did.

So I nodded, and Gunnar put the ring in his pocket, and he kept his hand on his pocket all through supper and all the way home the next morning.

The next year was hard, but it was ordinary hard. I will not pretend it was more than that, because a lot of women have done it and done it worse.

Gilbert moved into an apartment in Little Falls with Queenie. He took his truck and his deer rifle and his half of the savings.

I kept the house, because it was close to Gunnar’s school and his hockey rink, and because Gilbert did not fight me on it.

We did the divorce through a mediator in St. Cloud. It was final in March. There was no big fight.

There was no big anything. Gilbert signed what he was asked to sign, and he did not look at me much.

Gunnar did not want to see him at first. Gilbert called every Sunday night anyway. Some Sundays Gunnar answered and some Sundays he did not.

I did not make him. I did not talk his father down either. I just stayed out of it.

That was the part I am proudest of, if I am proud of any of it. I never once told Gunnar what I thought of his father.

He had seen it all for himself, on the dock, and he did not need me to explain it to him.

In September, Gunnar took the ring to school on a shoelace around his neck. In October a hockey coach told him to take it off for practice.

So he started leaving it in a little dish on the windowsill in his room, right where he could see it from his bed.

In January he asked me if it could be made to fit him.

“Your fingers are going to grow,” I told him.

“Then it’ll fit later,” he said. “I want to wear it now.”

So I took him to a jeweler in Little Falls, a man named Mr. Becker who has been in that store on Broadway since before I was born.

He set the ring on his counter and turned it over with a pair of tweezers.

“Tungsten,” he said. “Can’t cut it, can’t solder it. Hardest thing there is to work. Nobody can resize one of these.”

Gunnar’s face fell.

“But,” Mr. Becker said, “I can fit it. It’s a size ten. You’re a nine, near enough. I can put a thin liner inside, a little band that fits in snug, and take it down. It won’t hurt the ring. You can take it out when your hand grows into it.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Forty dollars,” he said. He looked at Gunnar, and then at me, and then at the scratch inside the band. “Thirty,” he said. “Come back Thursday.”

When we picked it up, Gunnar put it on in the store. It fit him. He held his hand out and looked at it the way you look at something you have earned.

Mr. Becker did not ask whose ring it had been. I think he knew. You do not run a jewelry store in a town that size for fifty years without learning when not to ask.