The Ring Comes Home
Part One: Grandma Rose’s Ring
My grandmother’s engagement ring was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
It wasn’t big. It wasn’t expensive. A small round diamond, maybe a quarter of a carat, set in a thin band of yellow gold with tiny engraved roses running around the sides. My grandfather bought it in 1956 from a jeweler in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with money he saved from his job at the steel mill. It took him eleven months.
Grandma Rose wore it every day for fifty-eight years.
When I was a little girl, I used to sit on her lap and turn it around on her finger.
“Someday,” she’d say, “this will be yours, Leah.”
“Why me?” I asked once. I was seven. “Why not Samantha?”
Grandma looked at me for a long time.
“Because you’re the one who asks me about it,” she said.
She tapped the little engraved roses with her fingernail.
“Your sister wants it because it’s shiny,” she said. “You want it because it’s mine.”
She died when I was twenty-one.
In her will, in her shaky handwriting, she left me her ring.
