The name engraved inside the band of the ring of my mother was Grace, and Abe Rosenthal read it to me through his loupe, in the shade of a palo verde tree by the pool, with the music of the mariachi band going on behind us as if nothing in the world were wrong. “Helena and Grace,” he said. “And a date. March 2019.” I could not breathe. March of 2019 was the month before Lowell passed. He asked me, that spring, to take the ring to a jeweler he trusted, and I said it was too much trouble, and he said, “Marian, give it to me.” He took it. He returned it in a week, and said it had been cleaned.
Abe Rosenthal said, “Madam, your husband came to my shop on Fifth Avenue in March. He sat in my chair, an old man with a cough, and asked for a very small engraving. He wanted the name of the girl who would one day wear it, so that no one could ever say the ring of your mother belonged to anyone else.” He had kept the work order for six years in a drawer, because, he said, it was the one engraving in fifty years that made him need a handkerchief. He took it out of his breast pocket. It was in the blocky hand of Lowell, with the date and his initials.
I looked across the patio at Kendra, who was laughing with a group of women and holding her margarita in the hand with the ring. I thought of how many years I had been polite. I thought of Lowell in the garage with his headlamp, repairing the landing gear of an airplane at three in the morning, and how his hands never shook. I stood up from the lounge chair. I took my cardigan off the back of it, and put it on. A woman who has typed every word of every lie knows the exact moment a witness runs out of story, and this was going to be a good one.
A tiny engraving gave one daughter in law the length of a birthday toast to bring her mother in law back to the truth in Scottsdale.
I gave my terms to Kendra on the patio, at the head of the taco bar, while Curtis was holding a tray of drinks and sixty guests turned around to watch. I did not shout. I spoke as I used to speak in the courtroom, to the record. I said that the ring was mine, that the work order of Abe Rosenthal proved it, and that she would take it off now, in front of everyone, and place it in my hand. I said I would keep the matter inside the family, and that Curtis would drive me home when the party ended.
Kendra held her hand up and looked at the ring as if she had never seen it. She said she had taken it from the velvet box because she was tired of feeling like the second wife, tired of being introduced as the second wife, tired of a house in which the first wife kept a candle. She said she believed I would never find out. She said she told her friends I was confused because it was easier than telling the truth. “Marian, I am sorry,” she said. “I wanted something that was old and real. Everything in my life is new.” I said, “That ring is old, and it is real, and it is also not for you.”
Kendra twisted the ring off her finger, and then, instead of handing it over, she closed her fist around it, snatched her purse from the taco bar, meaning to run through the side gate to her car and drive off to her sister in Tempe, and she bolted across the patio in her white dress with the ring in her fist and the margarita still sloshing in her other hand. Curtis said, “Kendra, stop.” The mariachi band stopped in the middle of a verse. I stood very still with my hands folded in front of me, like a woman at a bus stop.
It was the fiftieth birthday of Curtis, and the party had a piñata. A big papier mâché burro in rainbow stripes hung from the mesquite tree beside the side gate, and eleven children under nine, all with sticks, were lined up to take their turns with a blindfold. Kendra ran into the line. The smallest child, a boy of five in a sombrero, swung with all his might and missed the burro entirely and caught the fist of Kendra, and the ring flew in a bright little arc into the upturned sombrero of a girl of four, who stood very still and said, “Look, a prize.”
The girl in the sombrero carried the ring across the patio with both hands and gave it to me, solemnly, and I thanked her and gave her a dollar. The party went on, strangely, for another hour, with the mariachi band playing a ballad about a woman who returns what she has taken. Curtis drove me home, and said nothing until my gate. Then he said, “Mom, I am so sorry.” I said I knew. Kendra did not return to the house for a week, and when she did, she came with a letter, which I have read, and a box of sweet rolls, which I have eaten.
In the name of Lowell, who passed in 2019, I started the Lowell Dupree Hangar Fund. It pays for appraisers, engravers and lawyer hours for older women whose heirloom jewelry and keepsakes were taken or sold by relatives, in Maricopa, Pinal and Yavapai counties. In the first year we helped twenty one women get back what was theirs, and the first was a retired telephone operator from Mesa named Mrs. Nakamura, whose granddaughter had pawned a brooch from Kyoto. Abe Rosenthal appraises every piece free of charge. He keeps a handkerchief on the table, and uses it.
On the first Sunday in May, Grace came to my townhouse in Old Town, a young woman now, twenty four and a nurse. I put the ring in her hand and showed her the engraving through my own loupe, which Abe Rosenthal had given me. She looked a long time. “Grandpa wrote my name before I had a reason to need it,” she said. “He knew me before I knew myself.” I slipped the ring on her finger, and it fit, as if it had been waiting. The fountain, which only works in winter, started to run on its own. I decided not to ask why.
