The Treasure Behind the Candy

“Grandma, look! Somebody left a treasure!”

Ellie was holding her hand up to me in the candy aisle of the Walmart on Route 50. Her little palm was open. Her eyes were huge.

In the middle of her palm sat a ring.

Gold. Old-fashioned. With a diamond in the center so big it caught the fluorescent lights overhead and threw tiny rainbows across her fingers. Smaller diamonds all around it, like petals on a flower.

I’d never seen a diamond like that in real life. Only in magazines at the doctor’s office.

“Where did you find that?”

“Right there.” She pointed at the shelf. “Behind the box of Junior Mints. It was hiding.”

My heart started pounding.

I knew, the way you know things at seventy, that I was looking at more money than I’d held in my hand in a very long time. That ring could pay our bills for a year. Maybe two. It could fix the roof that leaked over Ellie’s bed every time it rained. It could pay for my blood pressure pills and my heart pills without me having to choose between them and her new shoes.

For one shameful second, I imagined keeping it.

Just one second. I saw it so clearly. Putting it in my coat pocket. Walking out to the parking lot. Driving to the pawn shop in Sedalia on Monday. A new roof. New shoes. A full refrigerator.

Nobody would ever know.

Then Ellie looked up at me with her serious brown eyes. Her mother’s eyes.

“Do you think somebody’s crying because they lost it?” she asked.

I swallowed hard.

“Let’s find out, sweetheart,” I said.