Chapter 7: Grandmother's Ring

I didn't take off my apron. I walked out the door with flour on my jeans.

Sinead locked up behind me and ran to catch up. Cal walked on my other side and didn't say a word.

The house was three blocks away, on a narrow street off Girard with trees that broke the sidewalks.

It was red brick, two stories, with a white door I'd painted myself in April while Rafferty held the ladder.

I'd put seventy thousand dollars down on it. That was every dollar the bakery had made me in four years.

Both our names were on the deed. Rafferty hadn't put in a cent. He'd said he'd cover the furniture.

Kelsey was still sitting on my front stoop when we turned the corner.

She had on a sundress and big sunglasses, and she was drinking iced coffee out of my favorite mug, the one I'd moved over in a box last week.

Rafferty was halfway out of a rented van with a mattress on his back.

The neighbors were out. It was a hot Sunday evening in Fishtown, and everybody was on their stoop anyway, and every one of them had seen the video.

The old man two doors down turned his lawn chair to face the show.

Rafferty saw me first. He nearly dropped the mattress.

Kelsey took off her sunglasses slowly.

"Oh," she said. "Hi."

"That's my mug," I said.

"You gave him the ring," Kelsey said, as if that settled everything. "You said keep him. I'm keeping him."

She held her left hand up in the evening sun so the diamond caught it.

Her string ran bright from her head to Rafferty's, over the mattress.

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