The Ring on My Mother’s Hand
“Eleven people have a key to that hall, Ms. Voigt, and one of them has my grandmother’s ring in a pocket right now.”
My niece Brandi said it on a Thursday morning in the front office at Sunflower Manor, with her purse on her shoulder and her chin up and a little tremor in her voice that I took, at the time, for grief. She is thirty-four years old. She cleans teeth in Wichita for a living, and she can sound very much like a person who has never told a lie.
“I’m calling the state on Monday,” she said. “And I’m giving them names.”
The director, Carolyn Voigt, folded her hands on the blotter like a woman who has heard this speech before.
Then Brandi turned and saw me in the doorway, holding my mother’s blue cardigan over my arm, and her face went hard, and then smooth.
“It’s a nine hundred dollar ring, Aunt Jeannie,” she said. “You’re standing there like it’s the crown jewels, and Grandma’s down the hall and won’t even know it’s gone.”
I did not answer her.
I want to tell you why, because the why is the whole story. It took me eight days to understand it myself.
My name is Jeannie Albro. I am sixty years old. I live in Wilmer, Kansas, a grain elevator and a Methodist church and a Dollar General on a county road that runs straight to the horizon in every direction. My mother, Hazel Whitcomb, was eighty-eight that March, and she was dying in Room 14 of Sunflower Manor with her hands folded on the quilt. For the better part of seven years I had been the one who showed up.
The ring first.
It was not much of a ring. It was a thin gold band worn nearly to a wire on the underside, with a diamond chip no bigger than a grain of salt. My father, Orville Whitcomb, bought it in the spring of 1955 from Gessner’s Jewelry in Newton for forty-two dollars. Inside the band, so small you needed a magnifying glass, he had them engrave six letters and a date: O to H, 6-4-55.
She wore it seventy-one years. Through three babies, one of whom we lost. Through a grass fire in 1971 and Daddy’s funeral. The diamond went cloudy and the band went thin, and she would not hear of having it cleaned. “It’s supposed to look like it’s been somewhere,” she said.
She had been promising it to me since November.
That Thanksgiving we pushed her wheelchair into the dayroom at the Manor, and Ray and I brought a pan of her own cornbread dressing, because nothing else tasted right to her anymore. After the pie she took my wrist with her bad hand, the one that shook, and said, “Jeannie Marie. When I go, my ring is yours.”
“Mama, don’t talk like that.”
“I will talk how I please. I’m eighty-eight.” She squeezed. “You’ve earned it twice over. Sue has her opinions and the girl has her life. You’ve got my ring.”
My husband Ray heard her. So did half the dayroom, because my mother never had a quiet voice for something she meant.
For sixty years there had been two daughters in the Whitcomb house. One was the pretty one and one was the dependable one. My sister Sue was the pretty one. She married young and divorced young, and she raised her one child, Brandi, on charm and a small checking account and a conviction that the world would arrange itself around you if you smiled right. I was the dependable one. I married Ray, a grain man like Daddy, and worked thirty-one years in the county clerk’s office, and I was the daughter who knew where the insurance papers were.