For a moment, I thought she would refuse.
Then she said, “Saturday afternoon.”
PART 3: What My Mother Had Done
I drove to Pittsburgh with Carol’s wedding ring in my jacket pocket.
At a rest stop, I took it out and held it in my palm. There was a small worn place on the underside of the band. I had looked at that ring for most of my adult life without noticing it.
I sat outside Anna’s house for nearly an hour.
When she opened the door, I saw the girl I remembered in the way she tilted her head, though her hair was silver now and she wore reading glasses on a cord.
Then she looked directly at me.
Something about her eyes caught me off guard. They felt familiar in a more recent, ordinary way, and I couldn’t work out why.
“Come in, Walter.”
We sat at her kitchen table. She poured coffee, spilling a little into my saucer.
“I’m sorry about Carol,” she said.
“Thank you.”
I waited while she folded a paper towel and wiped the spill.
“Do you know why she sent me here?”
Anna sat down slowly.
“I think she finally wanted you to know why I left.”
“You told me why.”
“I told you what your mother made me believe I had to say.”
I stared at her.
“Ruth came to my apartment after you proposed. She was wearing that gray coat with the fur collar.”
I remembered the coat. My mother wore it to church.
“She told me I wasn’t the kind of woman you should marry. She said my family would hold you back.”
“Anna—”
“Please let me finish. I’ve spent a long time wondering how to say this to you.”
I closed my mouth.
Her father had been struggling to keep his job. Her parents were behind on bills. Ruth knew people who could make their situation worse, and she had made sure Anna understood that.
She had threatened her father’s livelihood. Then she had threatened to spread stories about Anna’s sister, who was about to be married.
“I told her you wouldn’t let her do those things,” Anna said. “She asked how I thought you would stop her once you were gone.”
“My mother wouldn’t…”
The sentence died halfway out.
Ruth had taught Sunday school for forty years. She organized meals for sick neighbors. At her funeral, people had lined up to tell me how generous she was.
But I remembered other things, too. People lowering their voices when she entered a room. Her certainty that she knew what was best. The way disagreement could become disloyalty in her hands.
“Everyone listened to her,” Anna said. “I was twenty, Walter. My family couldn’t afford for her to be angry with us.”
I looked at the untouched coffee.
