Part 2: The Ring
She’d changed her shoes, I noticed. She’d worn navy heels at the church. Now she had on flats. She was still in the navy dress with the matching jacket. The one she and I had driven all the way to Joplin together to find. Her purse hung on her arm and her car keys were in her hand.
She didn’t look around. She came straight up the side of the room along the paneling, right past the whole line.
The band wasn’t playing yet. So when the talking died down, table by table, as people saw her, there was nothing to cover the quiet.
She stopped across the steam table from me.
Lorna was sixty-two. She’d been a widow for eight years. She’s a small, upright, careful woman who irons her pillowcases. And in the four years I’d dated her son, she had never once been unkind to me.
That was the part I couldn’t get past, standing there.
She taught me her mother’s noodle recipe. She sat with me at the hospital in Wichita for six nights the week my own mother died, because Derrick had to work.
“Amy Jo,” she said.
“Lorna.”
“I’ll take the ring now. I’d just as soon not make a second trip.”
She said it quietly. But it was a quiet room.
The ring was her mother’s. A small round diamond in a yellow gold setting from 1948. Derrick hadn’t bought it. Lorna had taken it out of her own jewelry box and handed it to him to give to me, and she’d cried while she did it.
I was never going to keep that ring. There was no version of that day where I kept it.
But it was also on my left hand. And my left hand was wrapped around a serving spoon, dripping with beef juice, in front of a hundred and forty people.
I could feel every one of them waiting to see what kind of person I was going to be.
Up at the head table, Daddy had started to rise. I caught his eye and shook my head. Just barely. He stopped where he was.
I picked a clean plate off the stack.
“You’ll have it tonight,” I said. “In its box. Wiped clean. The way your mother would have kept it. I’m not going to pull it off my finger over a steam pan and hand it to you greasy.”
Her mouth went tight. “I don’t think that’s for you to—”
“I’m serving supper right now, Lorna. There’s sixty people behind you.”
I laid a slice of beef on the plate. Then a second one, because she never takes enough.
“There’s a place for you at the head table,” I said. “It’s the same one that was always going to be yours. And there’s cake after. I’d like you to stay for it.”
She looked at that plate as if I’d held out a snake.
“I am not going to sit up there and—”
“Lorna.”
That wasn’t me.
It was her sister Judy, three places back in line. She didn’t say it loud.
“Your whole family is in this room,” Judy said. “Every one of us. We’re going to sit down and eat this girl’s supper, because she asked us to, and because it’s the least we can do. You can sit with us. Or you can go sit out in that car by yourself.”
She paused.
“But I’ll tell you which one people are going to remember.”
Lorna stood there.
I think she’d figured on a half-empty hall. A crying girl. A quick errand. Instead there was her own sister in the buffet line. Her own daughter Tammy at a table with the bridesmaids. And her son Jeff over by the wall, still in his best man’s suit, looking at his mother like he was asking her for something.
If she left now, she’d be leaving alone. In front of all of them.
She put her keys in her purse.
She took the plate.
“Potatoes are next,” I said. “Tell Connie’s girl to give you the corner. That’s the crispy part.”
I served until the very last person had come through. Then Connie took the spoon right out of my hand, put a plate in its place, and told me she’d come after me with a dish towel if I didn’t go sit down.
So I went up and sat at the head table after all.
Somebody had quietly taken away the other chair with the bow. I never found out who. Grandma June was on my left. Daddy was on my right.
And on the other side of Daddy, because it was the place that had always been hers, sat Lorna. Back as straight as a yardstick. Her beef cut into little pieces she wasn’t eating.
Nobody at that table said one cross word to her.
I’ve heard this story told back to me around town with things added to it, and that’s one of them. People say somebody gave her a piece of their mind. Nobody did. Daddy passed her the rolls. Grandma June asked after her tomatoes. Beth refilled her iced tea.
That was harder on her than a cross word would have been. I could see it on her face.
If somebody had lit into her, she’d have had something to stand up against. Instead she had to sit there and be passed the butter by the very people she’d sent a bill to. In front of a hundred and forty neighbors who all knew about that envelope by then.
About halfway through supper, she set her fork down.
“Ray,” she said. Low. “I expect you saw what I sent.”
“I did.”
“I put that cruise on my own credit card. Sixty-nine hundred dollars. It sails Monday out of Galveston, and they won’t give back a dime this close.” Her voice had a shake in it that she was working hard to hold down. “I don’t have that, Ray. I have never in my life carried a balance. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Daddy picked up a roll and buttered it. He took his time.
“Lorna, I’m going to say this one time,” he said. “And then I’m not going to say it again. Not tonight. Not ever.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He’s never needed to.
“A supper got eaten last night by thirty-eight people, and you and I were two of them. A boat’s going to sail Monday whether anybody’s on it or not. My girl didn’t order either one. And she didn’t cancel either one. You’ve brought it to the wrong house.”
Lorna looked down at her plate.
“I’ve got sixty-four hundred dollars in this room myself,” Daddy said, more gently now. “I’m not sending anybody an envelope. I’m sitting here watching Harold Dawson go back for thirds. I figure I got my money’s worth.”
He set the buttered roll on her bread plate.
That was the last time I ever heard anybody speak of the nine thousand dollars.
A little later, Jeff came up behind my chair and crouched down next to me, the way you’d do to talk to somebody at a ball game.
“He texted me again,” he said. “You want to know or not?”
I thought about it. “Is it short?”
“Yeah.”
“Go ahead.”
Jeff read it off his phone. Derrick had left the lake and driven south down Highway 169 to their cousin’s place in Tulsa. He said he’d known since spring that he didn’t want to get married. He kept thinking the feeling would pass. And every week it got harder to say out loud, until that morning it was just easier to drive.
That was the whole reason.
There was no other woman. There was no big secret. There was just a man too scared to have one hard conversation back in April.
“Okay,” I said.
“You want me to say anything back?”
“Tell him his mother’s here. And she’s eating.”
Jeff almost smiled. “That’ll scare him worse than anything.”
“I’m not trying to scare him,” I said. “I just think he ought to know where she is.”
The band was four men from Parsons who played country music and some old rock and roll. The leader was a heavyset fellow with a white beard. He came and found me while the plates were being cleared, holding his hat in his hands.
“Ma’am, we’ll do whatever you want. We can pack up right now, no hard feelings. Or we can play quiet. We had a first dance worked up, but we can skip right on past that.”
“What was it?”
He told me. It was the old Anne Murray waltz. Derrick hadn’t cared one way or the other what we danced to, so I’d picked it. Because my mother used to sing it at the kitchen sink when I was a little girl.
“Play it,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Play it first.”
He went back up on the little stage, and they started in.
Nobody got up, of course.
A hundred and forty people sat there holding their coffee cups and stared at an empty square of linoleum with a waltz playing over it. For about eight bars I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. I sat there with my face burning.
Then I heard the cane.
