I didn't know jealousy could reach past the living to the dead, until it did. Until its long sticky finger poked me through the veil.
I'd seen the pawn shop plenty of times, on the shoulder of Highway 99. The pawn shop with barred windows and dust so hairy the glass looked grey. With the "Open" neon light partially burned out it sputtered, so it was hard to tell: open, not open.
I pulled off the highway and angled my blue Ford Taurus station wagon onto the parking strip. The crunch of tires on gravel formed tiny puffs of dust smoke that wisped past as I dug to the bottom of my purse—past Legos and Teddy Grahams, past crumpled Kleenex and faded receipts—to fish out the wedding ring I'd plucked from a desk drawer one last time. My dead husband's dead wife's ring.
I buzzed to be let in. The door, with its metal bars, clicked. I yanked it open and stepped inside. Inside smelled like microwave popcorn, dirty ashtrays, and giving up. I coughed into my elbow. Blinked and blinked. My gut twitched as the door clicked closed behind me, and the hairs on the nape of my neck stood at attention when I spied a wall lined with rifles.
Another wall was packed with instruments, mostly guitars, a few saxophones, and three trumpets. Who had played them? Who would play them? An assortment of martial arts weapons too: ninja swords, crossbows, throwing stars, num-chucks, throwing knives, and things I had no idea what they were or how someone would use them.
"Can I help you?" a man asked from behind the counter. He had dark hair and wore Buddy Holly glasses. His body was shaped like a garden rake.
"I have a ring to sell," I told him and opened my hand.
A diamond wedding ring. A small oval cluster of diamonds set in white gold. I held it in my moist open palm, like an offering, or maybe a Please take it gesture, as my stomach spiraled. My throat tightened like it was stuffed with pollen.
After my husband's first wife died and her ring came to him, he told me he was keeping it to give to his dead wife's niece when she turned 18.
"Why not give it to her mom and she can give it to the niece?" I asked back when he first showed me the cluster of diamonds, a promise unpromised.
"I don't trust her mom," Kent said and stroked his coyote-colored beard with one hand like he did when he was thinking. "I want to make sure her niece gets it."
He had reason not to trust.
He and his first wife parted ways through the divorce course when the nearly bald tires on her van blew out when she crashed and died on a mountain road. After her family sobbed and wiped their wet faces, after they could breathe beyond their tragedy, they told Kent they were entitled to what would have been hers in the divorce. He gave them some of what they weren't legally owed: her teacher's retirement, her Honda Civic, plus a check. He was that kind of guy.
When my almost-husband showed me that ring, I wanted to say: Please don't keep it. Please send it. But I stared out the window. My breath raced away from me that night. Naked tree branches wiggled in the wind like so many ringless fingers.
"Claire would have wanted her niece to have it," he said, as I breathed my way back into my body. He opened and closed his leggy fingers around the ring that ten years before, he'd slid on his first wife's finger.
"It's a small thing I can do," he added, blinking his eyes that were bluer than the sky. "I'll take care of it when the time gets here."
I felt gut twitchy having his dead wife's ring, but I felt like an ass asking him to get rid of it so I held those please get rid of it words in the root of my throat.
"You won't have to see it," he claimed back then as he tucked it in the back corner of his desk drawer. "Promise."
I groaned when I unearthed that ring after Kent died. Wasn't it enough to have all my heartache over my husband's too-young death? He was 36. We'd been married three-and-a-half years when he crashed his car on an icy mountain road and died before the man in the car behind him could open his door. I was 28. Six months pregnant with our first. On the cusp of couple to family, believing I lost everything.
Grief swallowed me whole. I felt skinless, wandering around with muscles and organs exposed like drawings in Gray's Anatomy, all my nerve endings taller than me. Grief beat up my heart even while my heart beat on. I crawled through grief's belly a knuckle at a time with oceans of tears, more swear words than I knew, and my determination to stitch a life for myself and my boy. Just as I was believing in pinpricks of life again, in hope and joy and love too, just as my wobbly footing grew a millimeter of stable, I spied that ring again.
Who wants their dead husband's dead wife's wedding ring?
That ring seared a hole in my gut so big I was sure anyone could look at me and see what was behind me. I was jealous that my beautiful dead husband might be with his first wife. Did she greet him when he slipped from this life to another? When my father-in-law called her mother to tell her the horrible news, that his son died, she said, "At least they're together." Was it true? My gut rumbled, hungry for my husband, hungry for him to be with me, not with his first dead wife.
This was true too: I didn't want to be jealous. Jealousy felt puny. I wanted to be accepting that the spirit world is different than this world and whether they were or weren't together had new meaning. I wanted to be big-hearted. And yet. I tripped on jealousy when I uncovered her ring.
That small cluster of diamonds slipped to the front of the desk drawer a few times in the next year. "Oh, there you are," I'd say. We were becoming familiar, friendly even while I figured out what to do with it. Throw it in a lake? Donate to Goodwill? Leave it somewhere for someone to find? I ticked off with my ideas and left them to age in the desk drawer.
Then, as I was finding my way back to life and love—two things I was sure were impossible and, deep bow of gratitude, turns out they were possible—as my beloved Scot was moving in—this man who'd slipped into my life in a side-door way, who tasted like ocean and jazz music, who loved me and my toddler sun son up close. With sharing a closet, dresser and bathroom again. With carving room in my head and heart, it was time to get rid of the ring. I still wouldn't contact her family. That old fear of what they might want slept in the slurry of my gut.
I asked Kent's sister if she'd send it to the dead wife's family. She refused. I asked her if her girls wanted it since they were nieces too. She refused again. I turned to friends who knew the dead wife's family: "Will you get it to them?" Nope.
"Not stolen?" the pawn shop guy said and laughed a little laugh through crooked teeth.
He clamped the ring between nicotine-stained fingers. Then pulled out a jeweler's loop and squinted at it, at the small oval-shaped cluster of diamonds.
"Lots of inclusions. Not good grades of diamonds," he started and sucked in air that whistled a little through the gap in his teeth.
I eyed the handguns under the glass countertop in front of me and the bars on the windows behind. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
"I'll give you $32.00."
"Done."
"You sure?"
"Yup."
If he offered less, I would have taken that too.
As I drove away, $32.00 on the passenger seat, I longed for a stranger to give it to. It was before the days of people with signs at entrance/exit freeway ramps or I would have gladly brought a smile to a sign holder. Instead, I stopped to grab a few groceries. At checkout, I offered the $32.00 to the cashier with lemonade hair to her waist and a bluebird blue plastic barrette failing at holding back bangs.
"Will you give this to someone who could use a little extra?" I asked.
"What?" she said. Her drawn-on eyebrows arched double.
"Please," I said. "Whoever you think. Your call. Let's do a little good with a little cash."
When I got home and told Scot about the pawn shop piled with weapons and dust mites, with the guy offering $32.00 and the surprise on his not-poker face when I said yes, Scot shook his head.
This next part? When he tented his brows and asked if I would have taken less? My unproud feelings leaked through my chest and throat. My left scapula twitched, and I felt ashamed.
If life came with a do-over button, I'd let the niece's delight outweigh my fear. I'd ship the ring in a pretty ring box with a note: "Your Aunt Claire would want you to have this. I never met her, and I heard how much she loved you. May the ring hold sweet memories for you."
Anne Gudger is a memoir and essay writer. She is the author of The Fifth Chamber published with Jaded Ibis Press September 2023. She's been published in The Rumpus, Real Simple Magazine, Atticus Review, Citron Review, Sweet Lit, Cutthroat, CutBank, Columbia Journal, The Normal School, KHORA, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. At the start of the pandemic, with her beloved daughter, she co-founded Coffee and Grief: a community that includes a monthly reading series focused on grief in its many forms.
All views expressed are the author's own.
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