Chapter 24: The Ring She Picked

A year later, to the day, I walked into the Harcourt bar at midnight with a ring in my pocket.

The bar was the same, with the same dark wood and the same low lamps.

The hotel had changed hands in the spring.

The new board had sold it to a company that did not forge things.

I took a stool at the far end and ordered a club soda.

The bartender, who had been there that night, gave me a very careful look and set it down without a word.

I had paid twelve installments on the note by then.

Costa had tried to forgive the rest in March, on my birthday, in a card.

I mailed the card back with a check inside it.

He framed the check.

It hung on the wall of the little room above the bindery, next to the signed consent for the Coombs lots.

Beside that hung a photograph of my father holding the first key he ever cut.

The bindery had taken over the framing shop next door in June.

The woman who ran it had retired to Maine.

She wrote me every week to ask whether I had hired anyone who understood glue.

I had hired three.

My father came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and was in charge of the freight door.

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