Chapter 29: The Ring at Oak Street

Sam's POV

My mother caught me on the porch at the end of the night with her coat already buttoned.

"I asked her," she said.

"Asked her what?"

"If you'd asked her anything. She said you ask her things every day."

"That's true."

"That's not what I meant, Samuel."

She opened her purse and took out a small velvet box, worn pale at the corners, and pushed it into my hand.

I knew the box.

My father had given her the ring in it on a bus platform in 1989, and she had worn it until the day he died.

"Mama, no."

"Don't tell me no. Tell her."

"It's been two months."

"Your father and I were engaged in six weeks." She patted my cheek hard, twice. "You count too much. Stop counting."

She went down the steps to her car.

I put the box in my jacket and left it there for nine days.

I had a shift on the ninth night, a warehouse fire in Pilsen, no injuries, and the crew went home at dawn.

I didn't go home.

I drove to the lake.

The beach at Oak Street was empty except for a man throwing a stick for a dog.

I sat on the sand with my back against a concrete wall and watched the light come up over the water, gray, then pink, then a clean hard gold.

My phone buzzed.

Where are you?

Lake, I wrote.

I'll be there in twenty.

She came in her work coat, with her hair coming out of its clip and a thermos under her arm.

She sat beside me on the sand and handed me the thermos.

It was coffee, the way I take it.

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