“I can tell you quite a bit about what happened to that ring,” she said. “I’d like to tell the part I know before the part I’ve guessed gets into it. First place, I gave the ring to my father to take down to Josephine. I understood there was a chance it would be sold. My husband was still living. He said if it got us a place where somebody could mend a cup handle and put new numbers on the clock at St. Luke’s, that was a good use for sixty-eight dollars. He offered me his ring too, but his was steel and we thought it might fetch as much as a packet of bolts.”
“Why didn’t I know that?” Daniel said.
“Oh, Danny. You were seventeen. You had that girlfriend who spelled her name with a star on the end. I’m not sure you knew we lived in a house.”
“He must have been twenty,” Vernon said. “He had a mustache already.”
“He had that at fourteen,” his mother said. “It was the last part of him to catch on to the need for discretion.”
Her father had brought back a ticket, as he had been instructed. She put it in the bowl with other things she wanted to remember. Her husband took ill the following year. The illness was one of the hard ones in which a man got the news on a day in the spring and was gone by the time the lilies came in. For a few weeks people brought enormous numbers of lilies until she had to tell her sister to stand on the porch and turn some away.
“I grew to hate those little brown things in the middle. They get on your clothes and it looks like you’ve been in there rubbing your face in them. I had a black dress I wore to the funeral and a mark all down the sleeve I couldn’t get out. Then I didn’t want to get it out, because it had been such a bad job getting through the week that I felt like I’d gotten that mark honestly. Strange what we keep.”
When Josephine came to see her years later, Beatriz had remembered very little about the ring. She remembered the kitchen in which her husband had put it on her finger and the funny way he behaved for the rest of that day. He had asked if she minded spending Sundays with his mother, if she minded him sometimes putting shrimp in with the rice, if she minded the fact that he thought babies ought to be given sensible names and not named after furniture. She had asked what woman he knew who had named a child after furniture. He had said there was a boy in his third grade class called Chesterfield, although in later years the boy turned out to have been called Chester Field and by then it was too late to do anything about the family habit of calling their children’s toys Sofa and Ottoman.
“I remember all that. The actual ring I had to think about. Josephine said she had used it for something and wished she hadn’t. She didn’t offer me money. I want to go on record about that. She wanted me to come down to the shop and pick a different one, and I said sweetie, some days I wear my late husband’s sweater and some days I take it off and have it cleaned. Do you understand what I’m saying? It was never about wearing a ring.”
“What did you want?” Miriam asked.
“I wanted a chance to tell its new owner about the man who bought it. I’d had quite a sufficient time of people not saying his name in case it upset me. His name was Luis and he liked shrimp and a joke about furniture. Anybody with that ring on ought to know that much.”
“Did you get the chance?”
“Josephine was going to bring her over. She got sick. I sent soup and moved on with my day, which is a thing we used to do in those days while some of you were inventing voicemail. Then when I heard about the baby coming last month I said, I wonder if that girl still has it. I said it out loud in front of Alma, which is a mistake if you don’t want a thing looked into. If she were here she’d have finished all our taxes by now.”
Miriam put her head in her hands. She was tired and moved and just a little bit angry, and there was the question of the four million dollars hovering over the table, almost audible in spite of how beautifully a woman could speak about an orange or an old wedding ring.
“Would you mind if I asked you something that has money attached to it?”
“I’d never discourage anybody from attaching money to their questions.”
“Did my mother give you a vote when you gave up the ring?”
“She gave me a chair. In those days that was what they called it. Each person bought a chair, some in halves, some with more than one person sitting on them. I have the paper to prove it and I expect it’s worth less than your subway pass. Shall I get it?”
It was in the box beneath the wooden bowl. Daniel had naturally looked in the bowl and not thought of lifting the actual thing that held it, which seemed to be a source of familiar amusement to his mother. Beatriz carried the box over to the table and opened it. Inside was one share of the Dean Street Bench Association, bearing her signature and the date on the pink ticket. Together, the yellow copy, the pink ticket, and this share had given her a vote. Across the bottom was printed a sentence about the vote expiring after payment of the subscription amount plus interest, unless the holder elected to retain the share without interest and continue supporting the association.
“What did you elect?”
“I’ve never been paid and I’ve never sold my chair.”
“Could other people have kept theirs too?”
“Well, let me put it to you like this. Vernon, have you sold yours?”
“Man has to have someplace to sit.”
“See?” Beatriz said. “There’s two. If a thing is worth four million dollars I should think two people is enough to get you interested in looking for a third.”
It was ten minutes to four. They were going to have to leave, and nobody had had a chance to talk about Maisie. Miriam gave her name, Margaret Mercer, and watched as the old lady ran her thumb across the bottom of her water glass, making a little trail through its sweat.
“Maisie,” she repeated. “Now, you know what’s funny. After Josephine was gone I used to get a card every March when the clocks changed. Little drawings of flowers, mostly. Each came with a different thing a lady remembered about working on Dean Street. One time somebody let a chicken get loose at the fish dinner. Another time Vernon fell through his folding chair during a slide presentation and they had to carry him out still sitting in it. I kept those cards for a long time.”
“It was the second best seat in the house,” Vernon muttered.
“Were they signed?”
“Just an M. And then they stopped, and I thought she’d got tired of it. If you’re going back to their place there’s something I’d like you to take to that man. I don’t have the cards anymore. My kitchen flooded. But I’ve got the orange.” Beatriz picked up the painting Miriam had chosen. She signed the back, folded it in wax paper and gave it to her. “She sent a card one year that said when she was sick in the hospital somebody brought her one perfect orange and she spent all day peeling it and putting the pieces back into the peel so it still looked like an orange when her roommate woke up. That’s when I started trying to paint them.”
Daniel kissed his mother goodbye. At the door she tugged his sleeve. “Did you like the way the lady talked to my granddaughter in that shop?”
“No.”
“Then before you get busy helping them straighten out all this business, make sure you tell them what it is you want done about that. It’ll be so easy to lose her in the crowd.”
In the car he sat looking through the windshield. Some purple petals blew across the glass. He turned the wipers on and smeared them into a dark streak.
“You heard my mother,” he said.
“I did.”
“I don’t want Alma to go through life thinking that if she gets somebody important with the same skin color as her to back her up, that’s the grown-up solution to people treating her like dirt. I know she’s not going to learn everything she needs to know about herself from a lady at a counter. Thank God. I just don’t want her learning that from me.”
“Tell me what she should see when she walks back in.”
“A stool. A way to ask her question without making anybody lose twelve dollars an hour. And maybe a thing nobody has to be somebody’s daughter to use.”
“Would a repair desk do it?”
“Depends who’s allowed to sit there.”
Chapter 8 — A Number in the Margin
At four twenty the flagship had six people waiting in the little room. The three strange portraits had been taken down and leaned against the wall with their faces hidden as if they had been put in disgrace. At the head of the table sat Thomas Pike, Samuel’s nephew and the executor of his estate. He wore a suit the color of the sky just before a picture on an old television goes bad. His legal adviser had a small silver mustache and the unhurried manner of a man whose dog has already been walked by somebody else.
Peter stood by the window with a paper cup gone soft in his hands. Caroline had brought the closing schedules, a box of pencils and Theo on a small screen, waiting in a green room apparently full of other green children. She passed the phone to Miriam.
“Dad says even apple trees have to eat dinner. I’m going in ten.”
“I’m at the store, honey.”
“Are you going to fix it?”
“I’m going to do something I should have done in February first.”
“Okay. I have quite a bit of bark on my face or I’d blow you a kiss.”
He made the little noise anyway and hung up. She slipped off the hat she had been wearing all day and put it on top of one of the men in waistcoats. She had bought it secondhand in a coastal town in Georgia on the afternoon she found out the lump in her breast belonged to a much less alarming variety of cells than the doctor had feared. She wore it every year on the anniversary of that phone call. This was the eighth. It occurred to her that Claire had believed she’d dressed up to persuade a saleswoman she could afford diamonds, and it made her sad in a different way than it had that morning.
“I received your email,” Thomas said. “Is it really your intention to make this difficult?”
“My intention in February was to make it easy. I signed an inaccurate consent. I’m withdrawing it. I expect I’ll have a rather uncomfortable conversation with my board about why I signed in the first place.”
“Fine. Strike the little shop. We can come up with a figure to compensate and you can sign the rest.”
“There are things I do for four million dollars, but I don’t call it a little shop.”
“Four million is a figure in an appraisal. Liquidation and transaction costs eat quite a lot of that. You know as well as I do how a balance sheet works.”
“I know only too well how a number is able to make its way onto one.” Miriam laid Beatriz’s share on the table. She had a photograph, not the original, and she had blacked out the signature so nobody could possibly be confused about her willingness to negotiate on Beatriz’s behalf. “The building is occupied. The association has living members who retained their shares and have outstanding claims under the founding instrument. When you determined they had retired, did you consult anyone who’d ever been inside?”
“We relied on the inspection and our operating partners.”
“Who inspected?”
Thomas shifted a page. “A third-party firm did an exterior survey.”