Chapter 8 - The Golden Band
When Richard stepped back out onto the sidewalk of West Broad Street, the sleet had turned into a steady, silent fall of large, wet snowflakes that dissolved the moment they touched the black asphalt.
He walked to the passenger side of the Escalade, his hand clamped tightly around his closed fist, shielding the gold from the cold night air as if it were a candle flame in a gale.
He opened the door.
Evelyn was sitting exactly as he had left her, her hands resting on her vinyl handbag, her eyes watching the windshield wipers sweep clean arcs across the glass. In the back seat, Noah was asleep, his head resting against the leather headrest, his thumb hooked into the corner of the small plastic grocery bag.
Richard did not climb into the driver’s seat.
He dropped onto his knees right there on the wet concrete of the curb, the slush soaking through his trousers, heedless of the freezing water pooling around his shins.
He reached out with his left hand and took his mother’s frail, arthritic left wrist, lifting it gently from her lap.
He opened his right fist.
The gold band sat in the palm of his hand, gleaming with a deep, buttery luster under the amber interior dome light of the Cadillac.
Evelyn Vance stopped breathing.
Her eyes, clouded by age and forty-eight hours of weeping, widened until they looked like twin pools of gray mountain water. Her mouth opened, a tiny, trembling gasp escaping her lips that sounded like a sigh of deliverance after fifty miles of desert walking.
"Richie..." she whispered.
Richard didn't speak. He couldn't speak.
With fingers that were clumsy with cold and shaking with profound, agonizing reverence, he slid the heavy gold band over her knuckle.
It met resistance at the swollen joint—the joint that had spent fifty years kneading bread and scrubbing floors—and then, with a soft, velvet slide that felt like the closing of a circle, the ring settled into the pale, white groove on her third finger.
It fit perfectly.
It had always fitted.
Evelyn looked down at her hand. She raised her fingers to her lips, pressing the cold gold against her mouth, then pressed her forehead against Richard’s wet hair as he buried his face in her lap on the open floor of the vehicle.
"Arthur," she whispered into the cold leather of the car. "Oh, Arthur... he brought it back."
"I'm sorry, Mom," Richard sobbed, his voice muffled by the wool of her coat. "I'm sorry... I forgot... I forgot who we were. I forgot who paid for my school... I forgot who built the floor I stood on."
"Hush now, Richie," Evelyn murmured, her hand stroking the back of his neck with the slow, eternal rhythm of a mother rocking a cradle. "The gold doesn't forget. A good piece of gold remembers the fire that made it. It just waits for the slag to burn off."
She looked up, through the open door of the vehicle, toward the yellow sign of Buckeye Pawn & Loan.
The blue neon OPEN sign flickered once, twice, and then clicked off into darkness as Wayne Henderson turned the deadbolt from the inside.
Noah stirred in the back seat. He blinked his gray eyes against the dome light, rubbed his nose with the back of his sleeve, and looked down at his grandmother’s hand resting on his father’s head.
He saw the ring.
A slow, sleepy smile curved the little boy's lips. He reached out with two fingers, touched the cold Appalachian gold, and then pulled his navy blazer tighter around his chest.
"Can we go home now, Daddy?" Noah asked softly.
Richard lifted his head from his mother's lap. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his tailored suit, looked back at his seven-year-old son, and then looked at the woman wearing the Sears trench coat.
"No, Noah," Richard said, his voice dropping into a register that was quiet, firm, and entirely new. "We aren't going back to that house. Not tonight. Tonight, we’re going to the diner on the bypass. And we’re going to buy Grandma three pieces of apple pie."
He stood up from the curb, shut the passenger door with a soft, respectful click, and walked around to the driver’s side through the falling snow.
Behind them, on the center console, his corporate phone buzzed with an incoming call from Vanessa.
Richard did not pick it up.
May you like
He picked up the phone, rolled down the driver's side window three inches, and dropped the thousand-dollar device into the six-inch puddle of black slush beside the curb.
The screen illuminated once beneath the water, displaying his wife’s name in glowing white letters, and then died forever as the heavy tires of the Escalade rolled forward into the night.
