Chapter 23: Ring Finger

Dani called at 7:02 on Saturday morning.

"I didn't see anything," she said.

"Judd."

"I saw a dog. A large yellow dog was on my field, which is against every policy I've ever read."

"You turned on the lights."

"I was testing the towers. Nobody tests towers for four minutes."

"Dani."

"It was seventeen minutes," she said, very quietly. "I wasn't going to say."

I hung up on her, grinning, in my kitchen, in my own socks.

Then I put on a cardigan, and Dad put on his good cap, and we drove to a jeweler on Commercial Street.

It was a narrow shop between a vacuum repair and a tax office, with a bell on the door.

Dad had delivered mail to it for eleven years.

"She's the daughter of the fella I knew," he said at the curb. "Be nice."

The woman behind the counter was sixty, with a loupe pushed up on her forehead.

She held out her palm without asking what I wanted, and I set the ring in it.

She fitted the loupe over her eye and turned the band toward the light.

"F plus M," she read. "Six, twelve, eighty-two."

"My parents."

"I can tell." She put it down on a velvet pad. "Somebody wore it every day for a very long time. Look at the wear on the underside."

I looked.

The gold had gone thin and pale where a finger had pressed it, one side only, for decades.

"Which hand?" she said.

"The left."

"Ring finger?"

"It's where she wore it."

The woman glanced at my left hand, at the thin pale dent where my wedding band had sat for ten years.

She didn't say anything about that, which was the kindest thing she could have done.