The nurse said maybe another day, maybe two, and my uncle’s wife moved her chair around to the side of the bed where my grandmother’s left hand lay on the blanket.
On that hand was the one thing in our family anybody had ever FOUGHT over — a ring my grandfather bought in 1958 with his mustering-out pay — and eleven motorcycles were parked in the hospice lot because she had asked for them by name.
Marlys had wanted it since I was in grade school.
She leaned over the rail to kiss my grandmother’s forehead.
Her other hand went along the blanket at the same time.
ONE MOTION.
The stone caught the ceiling light on the way up.
Then it was GONE.
It went into the pocket of her cardigan, and she stood up and smoothed her skirt. “Anybody want coffee?” she said.
I was holding my grandmother’s foot in both hands and I could not get my mouth to work.
Then my grandmother opened her eyes on the pillow.
She looked straight at me first.
Then she turned her eyes on Marlys.
And she gave the smallest, saddest smile I have ever seen on a person, and she did not pull her hand back, and she did not say a word.
She closed her eyes again and did not open them.
FORTY MINUTES.
At the service Marlys cried louder than my uncle did and told a room of eighty people that she was the one my grandmother had called HER OWN, with that ring in her coat pocket the entire time.
I almost said it out loud at the graveside, in front of the riders and the flowers and everybody.
I said NOTHING, because of the way my grandmother had looked at me from that pillow.
Three mornings later a white van stopped in front of the house in Alder Grove, and a man in a windbreaker came up the walk with a clipboard and a box.
Marlys got to the door before any of us. “She always did know who to send things to,” she said.
She opened it on the kitchen table with all of us standing around her.
A gray velvet pouch was in it, and a folded letter with her name written on the outside.
She read four lines.
Her face went the color of the tablecloth, and the letter came out of her fingers and landed under the chair.
“She can’t have,” she said. “She couldn’t have KNOWN.”
Roy picked it up off the floor. “Deanna,” he said. “Read the rest of it.”
The chair with the bad leg
I took the letter out of my uncle’s hand and the paper was warm from Marlys holding it.
Four lines is what she had read. There were nine.
The first five were in the blue fountain pen she kept in the kitchen drawer, even and small, the way she wrote checks. The last four were in a ballpoint, bigger, going uphill, the letters shaking where they turned. She had put those on later, and I was standing in a kitchen with the paper in my hand before I understood that I was holding two different days.
The first four said what she must have thought only she and my grandmother could know. Marlys. I am writing this on a Tuesday and you are downstairs telling Roy I don’t need my rings on in a hospital. You are right about the hospital. You are not right about the rings.
The fifth line said: The pouch in this box is empty and I want you to open it in front of everybody so you know I meant it that way.
Roy reached over and picked the pouch up off the table and turned it inside out. Gray velvet, a little dust, nothing.
Marlys sat down in the chair with the bad leg, which nobody sits in, and it went over sideways under her half an inch the way it always does, and she grabbed the table edge.
“Read the rest,” Roy said again.
“I’m reading.”
The sixth line said my grandmother had sent something else, and where.
I read it twice before I understood it was not addressed to me.
I put my hand over that line and I said we should all sit down, and Marlys said she was already sitting.
Nobody had taken their coats off yet.
Roy said, “Whose name is on the outside of that envelope.”
“Hers,” I said.
“Then why are you covering it up.”
1958
My grandfather Hollis bought the ring in 1958 in a jewelry store in a town that does not have a jewelry store anymore.
He had mustering-out pay and a job lined up at a plant that took him twenty-six years to leave, and Verna was twenty and worked the counter at a pharmacy. She used to say he came in for cough drops eleven times in a month and he wasn’t sick once.
It was a round diamond, a carat and a half, in a plain yellow-gold band with no engraving inside it. He asked the man not to put anything inside it. Verna told me why once and I did not believe her, and then I got older and I did.
She said, “Because whatever he wrote in there would have been the last word, and he wanted to keep talking.”
That is the kind of thing she said. She was not sentimental about people. She was sentimental about objects, and she kept a running account in her head of who had touched what.
Marlys married Roy in 1989. I was not born yet. What I know is what I watched from a kitchen doorway for thirty years, which is that Marlys asked about the ring at every holiday she ever attended.
Not asked for it. Asked about it. Where do you keep it, Verna. Do you have it insured, Verna. You know a bank box is only forty dollars a year.
And Verna would say the same sentence every time. “It’s on my hand.”
She said it in a voice that was not a joke and not a fight. She said it the way you’d read off a number.
The last Christmas she was well, Marlys brought her a jewelry box. Cherry wood, felt inside, four drawers. She made a thing of it, she made Roy carry it in from the car with both arms.
Verna thanked her and put her reading glasses in it.
She kept that box on the dresser and it had her glasses in it for two years, and every time Marlys came over she looked at it and said nothing, and I watched her look at it and I said nothing too.
The week before the hospice, Verna asked me to bring the box to her room at the house.
She took the glasses out. She set the box on the bed and she looked at it for a while with her hands in her lap.
Then she said, “Deanna, does that woman think I’m stupid?”
The lot
There were eleven of them and they came because she wrote it down.
Hollis rode with a chapter out of the county for nineteen years and she had outlived most of them, but she had a list, and she gave the list to the hospice social worker herself, in her own handwriting, with the phone numbers.
The social worker told me that. She said in nine years nobody had ever handed her a list of motorcycle clubs and a request that they be told first.
She told me the other thing later, at the desk with her coat already on: that Verna had her seal a small box that same week, write a courier slip for the house in Alder Grove, and hold it in the office drawer until three days after the burial, whenever the burial turned out to be.
They came on a Thursday afternoon. They parked in three rows at the far end of the lot away from the doors, and one of them, a heavy man about seventy in a denim vest, came in and took his sunglasses off and stood at the foot of her bed and said, “Verna.”
She said, “Dale. You got fat.”
He said, “Yeah.”
That was the whole conversation. He stood there another minute and then he went out and sat on his bike in the lot for four hours.
Marlys did not like it. She said it twice in the corridor, once to Roy and once to a nurse who did not answer her. She said it was going to upset the other families.
I want to be honest about what I thought at the time. I thought she was being small and I let it go, because a woman was dying twenty feet away and I had decided in advance that nothing anybody said that week counted.
That was my mistake and it lasted three days.
Because on the Thursday night Marlys sat in the family room with her purse in her lap and she asked me, in a completely normal voice, whether Verna had said anything to me about “arrangements.”
I said no.
She said, “She’d tell you. She always liked you better.”
And she said it without any bitterness at all, which was the part that stayed with me. She said it like a man reading a road sign.
Then she said, “You don’t want it anyway. It’s an old lady’s ring.”
Pump six
The morning she took it, we had all been at the hospice since six.
There is a Sunoco a half mile down from the hospice and I went out at ten because my uncle had not eaten and neither had I. I filled up at pump six and stood there with the nozzle in my hand and my phone came alive against my leg.
It was Marlys. It was a text and it was not for me.
get here today. she is down to hours and D is at the gas station.
I stood at pump six and read my own initial in a message about my own grandmother.
I did not know who it went to. I still don’t, and that is one of the things about this I have had to put down and leave down.
What I did was I took a picture of it. I stood there in the wind with the pump running and I photographed my own phone screen with the timestamp on it, and then I drove back and I did not say one word about it, because I could not think of a single thing to do with it that would not end in shouting in a building where people were dying.
When I pulled into the lot the three rows were still in the far corner where they had put them the day before, eleven of them nose-out, and two men were standing between the last row and the fence with their arms folded, and I parked with the bag of food on the seat and sat there a minute looking at them.
I put the text in a folder on my phone with pictures of a broken gutter and my dog.
Forty minutes later she took the ring off Verna’s hand.
And when Verna opened her eyes and smiled at me, I have spent a lot of time since deciding what that smile meant, and the honest answer is that at the time I thought it meant don’t.
I thought she was telling me to keep my mouth shut so she could die without a scene in the room.
I sat at the foot of that bed and I held her foot and I obeyed a woman who was already most of the way gone, and every day for three days I hated myself for it.
Then Roy handed me the letter and I read line six.
Line six
The rest of it is with the man Hollis rode behind for eleven years, and the man is Dale, and I gave it to him on the Thursday in the lot — they put me in the chair and took me out the doors by the kitchen with a blanket over my knees, and two nurses stood there and watched me do it.
I read that out loud in the kitchen because Roy asked me to and because I could not think fast enough to do anything else.
Marlys put both hands flat on the table.
“That’s not,” she said. “She was on morphine on Thursday.”
“She wasn’t,” I said. “The pump wasn’t started until the Friday. It’s on the chart.”
I didn’t know that. I was guessing, and I was right, and that is the only lucky thing that happened in this entire story.
Line seven said: Marlys, I have known since the Christmas you gave me a box that you wanted the thing in it, and I have known for longer than that, and I am not angry about wanting. I got the ring the same way. Somebody wanted something and went and got it.
Line eight said: What I am not going to do is let you tell people I chose you.
Line nine said: Deanna, ask him.
Marlys got up. She got her coat off the back of the chair and she got it half on and Roy said her name once and she stopped with one arm in it.
He said, “Where is it right now.”
“Where’s what.”
“The ring you have got in your coat.”
Nobody had said the word coat in that room. I had not said it. The letter had not said it. Roy had watched his wife cry at a funeral for twenty minutes with her hand in that pocket, and he had known since the Saturday.
I found out later he had known since the Saturday.
She said, “You want to do this in front of her?”
“I wanted to do it Saturday,” Roy said. “You cried at me for an hour.”
“Because my mother-in-law had just died.”
“She wasn’t your mother,” Roy said. “She was mine.”
Marlys stood in the doorway with one arm in a coat and told us both what we were. She told Roy he had never once in thirty-seven years chosen her over that house. She told me I had been circling since I was nine years old and everybody could see it. She said she had driven Verna to fourteen appointments in one year and nobody in this family had ever said thank you, and that part was true, and I have not found a way to make it less true since.
Then she said the thing she should not have said.
She said, “She smiled at me. At the end. You all saw it. She smiled at me.”
And that is when I understood what my grandmother had been doing on that pillow.
She was not asking me to keep quiet.
She was making sure there was a witness at the foot of the bed.
I said, “She smiled at me first.”
Then I picked the letter up off the table, folded it back along her creases, and put it in my own pocket, and I said, “You can go. It isn’t yours to be in the room for.”
Dale
I drove out to Dale on the Friday, by myself, and I did not tell anybody I was going.
He had a house set back off a county road with a pole barn and four bikes in it and a woman’s garden gone over for the winter. He came out before I got to the porch. He had the sunglasses on his head and a coffee cup and he looked at my car for a second too long, the way men do when they already know what the visit is.
I told him I had a letter from Verna Tovey with my name in it.
He said, “I know. She told me it’d be you or nobody.”
He went in and came out with a coffee can. Not a box, not a safe. A Folgers can with the plastic lid on.
Inside it was a ring, and it was the ring, and it had been in that can since Thursday afternoon.
I said, “Then what did Marlys take off her hand?”
He said Verna had a copy made in 1998, when Hollis was sick and she was in and out of the hospital with him and did not want to be robbed in a parking garage. Cubic zirconia, plated band, forty-one dollars at the time. She wore the copy every day for four years and nobody in the family ever noticed, including her son.
She started wearing it again in June.
I sat down on the step. Dale sat down next to me, which took him a while.
I asked him why she gave it to him instead of to me.
He drank his coffee and he said, “She said if it was in your hands you’d have given it back to her.”
And I would have. I would have walked into the kitchen on the third morning and put it on the table in front of Marlys and said take it, take it, just stop, because I have done that my whole life and I did not know it was a thing about me that other people could see.
Then he said, “She left you the letter, though. That was the part she was proud of.”
Here is what it cost. Roy has not spoken to Marlys’s sister since November, and their kitchen has one person in it now. My mother thinks I should have burned the letter and let the woman keep a fake ring and a story. Two of my cousins agree with her. We do not do Christmas at the house anymore; we do it in two houses, and the smaller one is mine.
And I have a picture on my phone, taken at pump six, that I have never shown to anyone and never will, because showing it would be the one move Verna did not leave me.
The dresser
In April I took the cherry-wood box down off the dresser and I brought it out to the porch to clean it out.
Her reading glasses were still in the top drawer. There was a receipt in there too, and a rubber band, and a single earring that does not match anything I own.
I put the ring in the second drawer, which was empty, and I left the glasses where they were.
Dale rode by that afternoon with two others on their way somewhere, and he slowed at the end of the drive and put two fingers up off the bar without stopping, and the sound of them went off down the county road and took a long time to go.
I sat there with the box open on my knees until it got cold.
Then I took the glasses out, cleaned them on my shirt, and put them back.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s still fighting over a house their mother died in.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out I Was Five When She Knelt on That Kitchen Floor, and Nineteen Men Knew Better, or perhaps My Daughter Told Me About the Game Grandpa Played Behind a Locked Door, and don’t miss The Woman Who Called My Regulars Trash Didn’t Know Who Signed Her Husband’s Checks for another tale of unexpected connections.
