The ring in the glass case of Salcido Pawn and Jewelry on Alameda Avenue in El Paso was my ring, and I did not need the owner to hand it to me to know it. I am Juanita Rivas, seventy three years old, and I stood at the counter with my good purse clutched to my stomach and the false ring still on my finger. The brass band was worn thin at the bottom, the way fifty one years of dishwater wears a thing, and the engraving inside, R and J, six fourteen seventy five, Forever, was just as my husband Rodrigo had ordered it.
Mr. Salcido, a stout, kindly man in a short sleeved shirt, brought out the sales book without being asked. The ring had come in on Tuesday afternoon, sold by a young woman with long dark hair, who had shown an identification card and accepted six hundred dollars. He had priced it at fourteen hundred. He did not say the name, because the law requires that he keep it quiet, but he looked at me over his glasses and then at the ring on my hand. “Mrs. Rivas,” he said softly, “I think you already know who it was.”
I did know. It was Marisol, my granddaughter, twenty four years old, who has lived in the back bedroom of my house since her mother moved to Phoenix, and who brings me my chamomile tea every night at nine in the evening, sharp as a clock. She had been so sweet for months. She cooked, she cleaned, she drove me to Mass. I leaned on the counter, and the little brass bell above the door jingled, and I understood that the sweetness and the ring were the same thing.
A wedding ring in a pawn shop case gave one grandmother the length of a cup of tea to bring her granddaughter back to the truth in El Paso.
I gave my terms by telephone, standing at the counter, in a voice as steady as I could make it. “Marisol, this is your grandmother. I am at Salcido Pawn on Alameda. You will come here now, and you will bring the person who is making you do this. Mr. Salcido will hold the ring for exactly one hour. I do not want to call the police on my own flesh and blood, but I will, mija, if I must.” There was a long silence, and then a small voice said, “Abuela, I am on my way.”
Marisol came through the door twenty minutes later, with her eyes red and her hair in a clip, and she did not come alone. Behind her walked a tall young man with a shaved head and a gold chain, whom I had seen once at my back gate. “Abuela, his name is Dylan,” she whispered. “I owe him six thousand dollars from a car loan he talked me into. He said if I did not pay, he would hurt me. I took the ring while you slept, and I had a copy made at the mall. I was going to buy it back on Friday. I swear to you.” She dropped to her knees on the tile and wept.
Dylan looked at the girl, then at the case, and his face went hard. Quicker than anyone expected, he stepped around the counter, reached through the open sliding door of the glass case where Mr. Salcido had just laid the ring on a velvet tray, snatched it, and bolted for the front door, meaning to be gone down Alameda before the shop owner could find the telephone. The bell jangled wildly. He shoved a customer aside. Mr. Salcido shouted. And on the sidewalk, a burly delivery driver set down his boxes.
Dylan stopped at the curb with the ring clenched in his fist, the burly driver in front of him with his arms folded, Mr. Salcido and two customers crowding the doorway behind, and the hot white sun of El Paso beating down on the pavement. The driver spoke without any hurry. “Son, that lady is the age of my mother. Hand it over.” Dylan looked up the street, but there was nowhere to go. A patrol car turned the corner with its lights flashing, summoned by one of the customers. Dylan slowly opened his hand, and the ring dropped into the palm of Mr. Salcido.
The consequences were a mixture of law and mercy. Dylan was charged with robbery and with the threats he had made, and the district attorney learned that he had done the same to three other young women in the city. Because Marisol told the whole truth and helped the police, she received counseling and community service instead of a sentence. I paid Mr. Salcido the six hundred dollars he had advanced, and he refused to take a penny more. Marisol took a job at a pharmacy and paid me back, ten dollars a week, with a note on each envelope.
In the name of my husband Rodrigo, who passed in 2014, I started the Rodrigo Rivas Fund. It pays for emergency help and counseling for grandparents harmed by someone in the family and for debt help for young people trapped by predatory loans, in El Paso, Hudspeth and Culberson counties. In the first year we helped ninety eight grandparents and eighty one young adults. One was a seventy nine year old widow from Socorro who held her recovered savings book in both hands and told the counselor she had been too ashamed to tell her priest.
On a quiet evening in October, I sat at the kitchen table of my house in El Paso with the ring on my finger, the true one, and the light of the sunset coming through the window over the sink. At nine in the evening, Marisol came in from the hall with a cup of chamomile tea and set it down in front of me, her hand steady. She sat beside me, and she took my hand, and she touched the ring gently. “Abuela,” she said, “I will never forget what you gave me.” I told her that it was only the second chance everybody deserves.
