At Grandma’s funeral lunch my older sister took the ring right out of my hand in front of thirty relatives and said, “She wasn’t leaving her diamond to somebody who types other people’s words for a living.” Twenty years later she said sorry in aisle nine, holding it out in a box of bolts. Then I looked inside the band.
Mom is seventy-two now, and every Christmas she sets out two extra plates and asks if this is the year I’ll sit across from Becky.
Every year I say no.
I’ve been a court reporter since I was twenty-five.
I’m the woman in the little chair beside the witness stand, taking down every word while people lie and cry and change their stories.
Grandma Roslyn used to call me her record keeper.
She’d make me read her grocery lists back to her like they were testimony, then argue with them.
She died in March, the year I turned twenty-six.
The lunch was at Mom’s, in the good dining room, with lilies on every flat surface even though Grandma always said lilies smelled like a hospital.
I wore the blue dress, because she’d asked for blue instead of black.
Before the ham came out, Mom pulled me into the hallway and pressed the ring into my palm.
The little diamond in the thin gold band, the one Grandma used to turn around and around during sermons.
“She wanted you to have it,” Mom said. “Don’t make a thing of it.”
So I didn’t.
I sat back down and held it under the edge of the table, just to look at it.
Becky came around behind my chair and took it right out of my fingers.
Then she held it up for the whole room.
After the diamond line she laughed and said, “She was going to walk out with it in her purse. Go take notes, Shari. That’s what you’re for.”
Uncle Victor set his fork down.
Nobody else moved.
Mom looked at her plate.
I left before the coffee, and I didn’t come back for twenty years.
Last Saturday the door on Mom’s kitchen cabinet finally came off its top hinge.
So I drove to Brooks Hardware in Kenosha for screws, because every screw in her junk drawer was the wrong length.
Aisle nine is fasteners.
Two aisles over, a man kept testing a cordless drill in three quick bursts, then a pause, then three more.
I was holding a bag of brass wood screws up to the light when somebody said my name.
Becky.
Fifty-two now, the same platinum hair with darker roots, and a tan she did not get this time of year.
She was carrying one of those clear plastic organizer boxes with the little flip lids, holding it in both hands like it might spill.
“Mom told me you’d be here,” she said.
Of course she did.
“I’ve been trying to say this for a long time,” Becky said. “I was horrible to you at that lunch. I was grieving and I was jealous and I was a bitch. I’m sorry.”
She flipped open one of the tiny lids.
Grandma’s ring was sitting in the compartment with three carriage bolts and a tangle of washers.
Twenty years in a box of bolts.
A gray-haired clerk in a green apron, name tag that said Carlos, stopped restocking hinges and just stood there.
At the end of the aisle the girl from the register leaned around the shelf to watch.
“Take it,” Becky said. “Please. I just want this done.”
Done. Like it was a chore on her list.
“You don’t get to be done,” I said.
“Shari.”
“You stood up in Mom’s dining room and told THIRTY PEOPLE what I was for,” I said. “Mom couldn’t even look at me.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
“I heard you. I get paid to hear people.”
I took the box out of her hands, mostly because Carlos was still staring and I wanted to be anywhere else.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I said.
Then I walked out without the screws.
I sat in the parking lot with the engine off and the box on my knees.
The ring came out with a washer stuck to it.
I wiped it on my coat and held it up to the windshield.
There was engraving inside the band, tiny and worn soft, but I read small print for a living.
It said FOR SHARI. WRITE IT DOWN.
And after that, her little looped R, the same R she put on every birthday card I ever got.
She’d put my name in it while she was still alive.
Then I saw the folded tag in the next compartment over.
A jeweler’s repair tag, Becky’s name in blue pen, a date three weeks after the funeral.
Remove inscription, $40.
Somebody had crossed that out and written underneath it, customer changed mind.
Three weeks.
She’d known whose ring it was while I was still crying in my car about the lilies.
She’d known it every Christmas Mom set out those plates.
I went back inside.
She was still in aisle nine, staring at a rack of drywall anchors like they owed her money.
I held the tag up between two fingers.
“You KNEW,” I said. “You took it to a jeweler to get my name scraped off.”
Becky didn’t even look surprised.
“I didn’t find out at the jeweler,” she said. “I was in the car when she ordered it. I DROVE HER TO THE JEWELER, Shari. Two years before she died.”
The drill went off again two aisles over.
“Then why,” I said.
She looked past me toward the front of the store.
“Because the ring isn’t the only thing she had put in writing for you,” Becky said.
And behind me, up by the register, my mother said, “Becky. You promised me.”
The gum rack
Mom was standing by the gum rack at register two with her purse held flat against her stomach.
She’d ridden over with Becky. So she hadn’t just told Becky where I’d be. She’d come along to watch.
“You promised me,” Mom said again. “The ring. That’s all we said.”
“That’s all you said,” Becky said.
The girl from the register looked at Mom, then at us, then down at her screen.
Mom came down the aisle in her church shoes. She didn’t look at me. She looked at the box in my hand, at the open lid, at the folded tag sticking out of it.
“Put that away, Shari,” she said. “People are working.”
Carlos went back to his hinges. He hung the same one on the hook twice.
I closed the lid. “Put what away?”
“Don’t do that. Don’t do the court thing.”
“What did Grandma put in writing, Mom?”
Mom turned to Becky. “We are leaving.”
Becky didn’t move. She was looking at me the way she used to look at me across the back seat when one of us was about to get it.
“It’s in the cookie tin,” Becky said. “Over the fridge. It’s been in that tin since the funeral.”
“There is nothing in that tin but buttons,” Mom said.
I had seen that tin. Four hours earlier, with the cabinet door in my hands.
The tin
That morning was the first time I’d been inside Mom’s house in twenty years.
We’d had lunch every other Sunday at the Pancake Hut on 75th Street the whole time, same booth by the coat rack. She paid. I tipped. She asked about Christmas. That was how we did it.
But the cabinet door came off, and she couldn’t hold it up and drive the screws at the same time, and she called me on a Wednesday and said, “You’re the only one who’s handy.”
So I went.
The house smelled the same. Pine cleaner and the furnace. The good dining room was through the archway, and I didn’t look at it.
The cabinet was the tall one over the fridge. When I lifted the door off the bottom hinge, there was a blue Danish cookie tin on the top shelf, the kind every grandmother in Wisconsin owns, and Mom said, “Leave that. That’s fine where it is.”
I hadn’t touched it. I was holding a door.
“I’m not going to eat your cookies, Mom.”
“It’s sewing things,” she said.
Then she sent me to Brooks, and she said it twice, Brooks in Kenosha, the one by the Walgreens, like there were three.
Mom keeps things in places. She always has. The deed to the house and her marriage license and our birth certificates lived in the dining room hutch, under the stack of Christmas plates, because she said a fire would get there last. Becky and I used to sneak looks at our own birth certificates and put them back crooked.
And Grandma, the last Thursday I drove her to the doctor, made me read back her pill list in the car. Then she said, “I put you in writing too, record keeper. Your mother’s holding it. When it comes, read every word out loud. Don’t let anybody skip the parts they don’t like.”
I thought she meant her will. There wasn’t much will. A savings account split three ways and a Buick nobody wanted.
Nothing came. I figured she’d been tired.
Now Becky and Mom were walking out the automatic doors ahead of me, and Mom wasn’t headed for Becky’s car.
She was headed for mine.
Driver’s side window
I got in and locked the doors. That’s what you do at forty-six when your mother is coming at you across a parking lot.
She knocked on the glass with one knuckle. I put the window down two inches.
“Your sister is not well,” Mom said. “She hasn’t been well since that husband.”
“She seemed fine.”
“She wanted to give you the ring. I thought it would be nice. I thought after all this time you two could stand in the same building.” She looked at the box on my knees. “You have it. That’s what your grandmother wanted. It’s done.”
“What’s in the tin, Mom?”
“An old woman’s letter. She was on a lot of medication, Shari. She said things about everybody.”
“About me?”
“About me.” She pressed her lips together after that one. “It’s private. She was my mother.”
“It says for Shari on the ring.”
“And you have the ring.”
She stepped back and pulled her coat closed and said, “Bring the screws when you’re ready. That door’s hanging by one hinge.” Then she walked back toward Becky’s Equinox like we’d settled on a restaurant.
I hadn’t bought the screws.
I called Uncle Victor. He’s seventy-six now, and he picked up on the first ring, which he never does.
“Shari,” he said. “Is this about the ring? Your mother said Becky was going to do something today.”
“Did Grandma leave a letter?”
He was quiet long enough that I checked the screen.
“I don’t know about a letter,” he said. “I know your mother had an envelope in her hand before the ham came out. She took Becky in the kitchen with it. I went in for ice and they both stopped talking, and your mother put it in her apron.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“I heard her laughing,” Victor said. “Your mother. She was reading something out loud and laughing.”
Ten minutes
Becky got in the passenger side without asking. Her nails clicked on the handle. She sat with her purse on her lap the way Mom does.
“She’s in my car with the heat on,” Becky said. “She thinks I’m out here apologizing again.”
“Are you?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” She looked at the box. “You want to know what she said in the kitchen.”
I didn’t answer. In court you let them fill it.
“She read me a piece of it,” Becky said. “The part about you coming every Thursday. And she said, in that voice, ‘My mother left her diamond to somebody who types other people’s words for a living.’ And she laughed. And I laughed. And then I walked into the dining room and said it louder.”
“Those were her words.”
“Most of them. I added the purse.” Becky picked at her thumbnail. “After, she said hold onto it till things calm down. Things never calmed down. So I kept it in the garage where my husband wouldn’t pawn it.”
“And the jeweler.”
“That was me. All me. I stood at the counter and I couldn’t make the man do it.”
“Why now?”
“Because she co-signed on my house when he left, and every time I’ve opened my mouth in twenty years she’s mentioned it.” Becky laughed, not a real one. “And because she set this up like a church raffle. Give Shari the ring, everybody hugs, Shari comes to Christmas, the tin stays up there. I promised. So now I’m the one who breaks promises.”
“I’m going to go get it.”
“Back door’s never locked.” Becky opened her door. “I can keep her here maybe ten minutes. I’ll cry. She can’t leave when I cry.”
So I drove.
It’s eleven minutes from Brooks to Mom’s if you make the light on Sheridan. I made it.
The back door was open. The cabinet door was still leaning on the counter where I’d left it. I stood on the step stool and pulled down the blue tin and pried off the lid.
Buttons. Hundreds of them, and a pincushion shaped like a tomato.
Nothing else.
The Christmas plates
I stood on the step stool holding a tin of buttons, and the fridge kicked on under my feet.
She’d moved it. Sometime after I left that morning and before Becky picked her up.
Mom keeps things in places.
I went through the archway into the good dining room. Same table. Same chairs. A bowl of wax fruit where the lilies used to be.
The hutch drawer stuck, the way it stuck when I was nine. I lifted out the Christmas plates, the white ones with holly on the rim, all twelve, and set them on the table. Under them was the deed and the marriage license in a plastic sleeve.
On top of the sleeve was an envelope that had been opened and closed so many times the flap was soft as cloth.
Mom’s handwriting on the front. Shari, after.
Inside were two sheets of Grandma’s lilac stationery and that looped R at the bottom of the second one. Dated the January before she died.
I sat down in my chair from the lunch. It was the closest one.
Lena, it started.
You give her the ring at the table. Not in the hall, not in the car, at the table with everybody looking. Then you hand her this and she reads it out. She reads better than any of us and she won’t skip the parts about you.
If you give it to her quiet, somebody will say she took it. Somebody always does in this family.
The second page was for me. Thursdays. The pills. The grocery lists she argued with. Then one line I read three times.
Lena, it isn’t typing. It never was. She’s the only one of you who writes anything down.
Outside, a car door shut in the driveway.
Then a second one.
Speakerphone
Mom came in through the back like always and stopped in the archway when she saw the plates stacked on the table.
Becky was behind her with mascara under one eye.
“You went in my hutch,” Mom said.
“You read it to her,” I said. “In the kitchen.”
“She was dying, Shari. She was angry at everybody. She was angry at me because I put her in Lakeview, and you know why I did that, I did that because nobody else would. I had the bills, the house, the lawyer, all of it, and you showed up Thursdays with a notebook and she thought you hung the moon.” Mom set her purse on a chair. “And she wanted that read out loud. At her funeral. In front of my brothers. In your voice, that court voice, so everybody could hear what I was.”
“So you handed it to me in the hall.”
“I handed you a ring. You got a ring.”
“And then you stood in the kitchen and said that line.”
“I said a lot of things that week.” She looked at Becky. “I never told her to say it in front of people.”
“You never told me not to,” Becky said.
“You were thirty-two years old.”
I took out my phone, called Victor, and put it on the table between the plates.
“Shari?” Victor said. “Is that your mother?”
“Grandma asked for this to be read at the table,” I said. “So I’m reading it at the table.”
“Don’t you dare,” Mom said. “Don’t you DARE do this to me in my own house. You read that, you don’t come back here. No Sundays. I mean it.”
I read it.
All of it, the way I read back testimony when a judge asks, without stopping for anybody. The part about the hall. The part about somebody saying I took it. The part about Lakeview. The Thursdays.
When I got to it isn’t typing, Mom laughed. The same laugh Victor heard over the ice bucket.
“It’s typing, Shari,” she said. “You sit in a little chair and type what other people say. That’s all it ever was. My mother put a typist over her own daughter in a letter she wanted read at her own funeral, and you want me to set the table for it.”
Nobody said anything.
Then Victor, small and tinny out of the phone. “Lena. I’m hanging up now.”
He did.
Mom picked up her purse and looked at Becky. “Don’t call me about the house.”
“Okay,” Becky said.
Mom looked at me. “Put my plates back.”
I folded the letter into my coat pocket.
I left the plates where they were.
Christmas Day
Mom hasn’t called on a Sunday since. I don’t go to the Pancake Hut anymore.
Becky says the cabinet door is still leaning on the counter. Mom won’t let anybody hang it.
I went back to Brooks the next Saturday anyway. Carlos found me the brass screws and didn’t say one word about aisle nine. He put an extra one in the bag.
They’re in my junk drawer now. The right length for nothing I own.
At Christmas I set two plates at my own kitchen table. Mine, from Target, one with a chip on the rim I gave it myself.
Becky came at four with a pie from the Piggly Wiggly and no tan.
She sat across from me and looked at my hand.
I wear it on the right. It’s a little big. I turn it during depositions when somebody’s lying, which is most of them.
“Can I see it?” Becky said.
I didn’t take it off. I held my hand out across the table, palm down, under the light, so she could look as long as she wanted.
“Read it to me,” Becky said.
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody whose family still sets out an extra plate every year.
Family tensions have a way of resurfacing in the most unexpected moments – see what happened when a husband’s old apprentice stayed on their couch and the wedding where a father walked out with the groom’s dad. For another painful family gathering, read the Christmas visit that ended on the porch.
