The pawn shop owner called the house at eight the next morning, a gruff man named Sol Bernstein, who had run the shop on Speedway for thirty seven years and who sounded as if he had not slept. He said a man had come in two days earlier with an envelope of cash and asked to buy back a stone that had been sold in 1990. The man was in his seventies, he said, thin, with a white mustache and a cane carved from mesquite. “When I described him to my wife,” he said, “she said he looked just like your husband.”
I put down the phone and sat on the edge of my bed with the reading glasses of Raúl in my lap. There was only one man in Tucson who looked like Raúl, and he had not spoken to me in thirty four years. Efraín. The younger brother. The funny one, the one who played guitar at every wedding and drank at every funeral. I had not seen him since 1990, the year of the move, the year the velvet box disappeared. I had always known in my heart. I had never said it.
Mateo drove me to the address that Sol Bernstein gave us, a small adobe on the south side with a faded blue door. Kristen sat in the back seat, silent, twisting a tissue. She had not said a word since the courthouse. I knocked. A woman in a nurse uniform opened, and behind her, in a hospital bed set up in the living room, lay a man with a white mustache, thin as a rail, with a tube under his nose and the whole face of Raúl looking out at me. “Hello, Efraín,” I said.
He wept the moment he saw me. He was seventy three years old, he said, with something in his lungs that the doctors could do nothing about, and he had been waiting for three weeks to find the courage to come knock on my door. “Cuñada,” he said, in the voice of an old man who has said a prayer a thousand times, “I stole it. In the move. I took the ring from the box when you were out of the room. I was drunk and I owed money to a bad man. I sold the stone. I swear on our mother, I thought I would buy it back.”
Forgiveness does not erase the wrong. It only refuses to let the wrong be the last thing that is true.
I sat in a chair beside the bed. Mateo stood by the door with Kristen. Efraín told me the rest in whispers. He had a friend who cut stones, and the friend had made him a copy, so the ring would still look right on my finger. He thought I would never notice. He thought he could redeem the real stone in a month. A month became a year. The pawn shop sold it. He did not have the money, and he could not tell his brother. He had been carrying that ring in his chest for thirty four years.
“Raúl found out in 1992,” Efraín said. “He came to my house on a Sunday after church. I thought he would kill me. He sat on my porch, with his hands on his knees, and said, Brother, I know. He had been to Mr. Esquivel, who had told him the stone was not right. He said he forgave me, and that I was never to tell you. He said that you had been happy for eighteen years, and a ring is only a ring.” He coughed for a long time. A nurse brought him water.
Mateo made a sound like a man struck. He crossed the room in three steps and knelt at the bed. “Tío,” he said, “Papá knew?” Efraín nodded. “He knew. And he wrote a note and put it in the box, in case you ever found it, so that you would not hate me.” Mateo turned to me with tears streaming. “Mama, I read the note in the courthouse, in the hallway. I could not say it. It says, Efraín took the stone. I forgave him. Please forgive him too, for my sake.”
I had the paper in my pocket. I took it out and read the words of my husband in his square, careful hand. I was seventy six years old, and I had been wearing a forty dollar stone for thirty four years, and I had never once felt cheated. That told me something. Raúl had given me everything that mattered a long time before he gave me that ring. I looked at his brother, small and shaking under a hospital blanket, and I took his hand. It was warm. “Efraín,” I said, “I forgive you. For Raúl. And for me.”
Kristen had been standing by the door the entire time. She came forward now, slowly, with her hands pressed to her mouth. She said she had borrowed the ring in October because she was proud and jealous and afraid of getting old. She said her own mother had died young, and she had wanted to feel like part of a family that owned beautiful things. She had not known it was fake. She had never imagined it was a lie. “I said terrible words at that table,” she whispered. “Please, may I have a chance to take them back?”
We had that conversation too. It took an hour and a pot of coffee that a nurse made for us. By the end Kristen was sitting on the arm of my chair and I was holding her hand, and somewhere in the middle of it, Mateo and Efraín had begun to laugh about the time Raúl got stuck on a roof in a mariachi suit. It was the best afternoon I had spent in that family in years. When we left, the sun was setting over the Santa Catalinas, and the sky was pink as the inside of a shell.
Mr. Esquivel reset the stone in a new gold band that spring, with a tiny fire in the middle of it, the way it looked on that bench in 1974. Efraín lived to see me wear it. He died in April, with Mateo on one side and me on the other, and I played his guitar at the funeral, badly. I keep the lab made stone in a small dish by my bed, beside the reading glasses of Raúl. It reminds me that love is not the stone. It is the hand that lets you keep it.