Part 3 — A Ring Comes Home
I looked down the long table at the one person who had asked to be alone with Carl before they closed the lid, and my daughter Rae Ann looked back at me. Her phone lay forgotten on the tablecloth. On the third finger of her right hand she wore a plain gold band that I had seen on her father for forty-six years.
“Mama,” she said, and then she could not say anything for a while. The restaurant was so quiet I could hear the salad bar cooler humming. Colby had stopped chewing. My sister Faye was holding a dinner roll in the air. Rae Ann twisted the ring around and around. “I took it off him at the funeral home,” she said. “While you were talking to Pastor Gibbs. I could not stand the thought of it going into the ground.”
I want to tell you what I felt, because it surprised me. It was not anger. It was a tired sort of sorrow, like finding a stain you thought you had washed out of a tablecloth years ago. I had buried my husband believing his ring was on his hand, and for six years his daughter had worn it in secret and said nothing.
Mr. Mallory cleared his throat. The photograph of the hooded figure, he explained, came from an old fraud file that the bank reopened in March. Someone had used the old card of Carl, which I had never thought to cancel, nine days after the funeral and many times since. The card sat in a drawer at my house, and Rae Ann had a key. Withdrawals of two and three hundred dollars, over six years, came to $9,400.
“I was going to put it back,” Rae Ann said, and she began to cry. “Colby lost his truck, and then his job, and every time he called me, Mama, I could not say no. And when he moved in with you, I told him how to order the second card online. I told myself it was all the same pot, yours and mine and his. It was never the same pot. I knew it every single time.”
Love that cannot say no will eventually pay for everything with money that belongs to someone else. I did not say that out loud. I only reached across the table and put my hand over hers, the hand with the ring, and held it still. It was cold, and it was shaking.
Colby stood up slowly. He took off the gold chain and laid it on the plate next to my cake. “Grandma, I am sorry,” he said. “I did not think of it as stealing. I thought of it as borrowing from the family.” I looked at my grandson, twenty-four years old, with his mother crying beside him. “Colby, there are no loans in a family,” I told him. “There is only giving and taking, and you have to know which one you are doing.”
The district attorney of Cullman County charged Colby with theft and with fraudulent use of a debit card. He pleaded guilty in the winter. The judge gave him three years of probation, ordered full restitution of the $31,640 and the earlier amounts, and sent him to a program that teaches young men how to hold a job. The bank refunded every dollar to me within the week, and he repays the bank now from his paycheck at the poultry plant.
Rae Ann pleaded to a lesser charge of conspiracy to commit theft. She received probation and two hundred hours of community service, and the judge, who had a sense of humor I admired, assigned her to the cafeteria at Good Hope Elementary. On Fridays she serves fish sticks and yeast rolls in a hairnet, with Mrs. Hendrix watching her work. I think it is the best thing that ever happened to that girl.
There at the table she slid the ring off her finger and laid it in my palm. It was warm from her hand. I put it on my thumb, because it would not stay on any other finger I had. The ring of my husband had come home, and I was not going to let it out of my sight again.
The waitress brought the cake back out, a single slice of chocolate with a single candle. The whole Western Sizzlin sang Happy Birthday to me, even the cooks, who came out of the kitchen wiping their hands on their aprons. I blew out the candle myself and made a wish I will not say.
I closed every old account that week and opened a new one with my name alone. I keep my own records in a Folgers can behind the flour. I still cook supper for Colby on Wednesdays, and he does the dishes, slowly, with the radio on. He is learning the difference between an empty hand and a held one.
