I unfolded the slip of paper on the glass counter of the shop and flattened it with the side of my hand, and I read it the way I read every unfamiliar object that comes through the door, from the top down, looking first for the maker and then for the date. It was a layaway receipt. The jeweler was Hoffmann and Sons, on Third Street, which had closed in 1970. The date was the third of April, 1969. And at the bottom, in pencil, in the broad square printing of Augie, were two words.
Gimbels girl. That was all. I read it twice, then a third time, aloud, and my grandson looked up from the stool by the register with his knees tucked against his chest. “Grandma, what does it mean?” he asked. For a moment I could not answer. I turned the paper over. On the back, in the same hand, was a little column of figures. Five dollars down. Five dollars a week. A pair of lines for a diamond solitaire in a plain gold setting. Paid in full, the eleventh of January, 1971.
I put my left hand on the counter. On the third finger sat the ring, small and bright, that I had worn for fifty five years. I had always believed Augie bought it the week he proposed. That was the story we told our children. A baker walks into a department store on his lunch hour with flour on his shoes, sees a girl at the fur counter, and asks her to marry him two months later. I had not known that the story began two years earlier, on the sidewalk, outside the window.
I laughed, and then I cried, and then I did both at once. Dylan came around the counter and put an awkward arm around me. “Grandma,” he said, “I do not understand. The coat? The ring?” I wiped my eyes. “Your grandfather saw me through the front window of Gimbels in the spring of 1969,” I said, “when I was twenty one and fitting a stole on a woman from Whitefish Bay. He never came in. He went straight to Hoffmann and Sons and put down five dollars.”
A man in love does not always announce it, but sometimes he puts a little aside each week and lets the years do the speaking.
I explained the rest as best I could, from the pieces. He had been too shy to speak to me. He had not been sure that a baker, with a bakery that was losing money, had any right to approach a woman who sold furs to the wives of bank presidents. So he had begun to save. A ring takes time to pay for, and courage takes longer. In the winter of 1970 he finally walked through the doors of Gimbels with that nervous smile on his face, and bought a scarf he had no use for.
I told Dylan that the coat itself was a second layaway. In 1983, when the bakery finally turned a profit, Augie had bought the fur from my own department while I was on break, with a hundred dollars in the pocket he had been saving since the day the shop opened. And he had sewn the receipt of the ring into the lining, with brown thread, by hand, so that if I ever lost the ring, or the coat, or him, I would find the whole beginning of the story again.
Dylan was silent for a long time. Then, in a low voice, he said that he was ashamed of himself. He had told his girlfriend the coat was old. He had said I did not go anywhere. He said he had thought of me as someone who had finished living, and here was a love story as vivid as any I might find in a book. “I do not think I ever saw you,” he said. “I think I only saw somebody who was my grandmother.” I put my palm against his cheek.
Kayla came into the shop two days later, alone, on a Wednesday afternoon. She stood at the door for a while before she came in, with her hands clasped in front of her, and I thought of how young she was. She was wearing no mascara. She apologized without being asked, directly and simply, and said that she had taken a coat that was not hers because she had wanted to feel like a different person for one night. She said she had posted the photograph before thinking. She had taken it down.
I looked at her for a while. Then I asked if she knew how to fold fur. She did not. I showed her. It takes patience, I told her, and a gentle hand, and a clean surface, and a respect for the animal that once wore it. She watched me with her lips apart. I gave her a pair of white cotton gloves and a pile of old stoles, and she folded them one by one while the afternoon light moved across the floor. By closing time she was quite good.
She comes on Saturdays now, to learn the trade. The owner, Dorothy, who is half my age and wears a ring in her nose, says Kayla has an eye. In the fall she sold her first coat, a gray persian lamb from the sixties, to a woman who cried because it smelled like her grandmother. Kayla told her the whole history of the coat, label by label, and the woman bought a scarf as well. Then she posted a picture of it online, with the true price, and the true story.
On the day of my seventy sixth birthday, Dylan arrived at my condo with a box. Inside was a bag of fresh bread from a bakery on Brady Street, a card in his own hand, and a small silver frame. He had put the layaway receipt inside it, flat between the glass, with the two words facing up. I wore the fur coat to dinner that evening, the full length ranch, with my initials in gold thread. It was twenty degrees out. I did not feel the cold at all.