does not have a mans wedding ring, worn thin from being held, unless once, long ago, she was a wife.
That was the one thing in the box. A mans gold wedding band, plain, rubbed nearly smooth, resting alone on the steel bottom of a safe deposit box we all figured would hold costume jewelry and a few dollars. I picked it up and turned it to the light, and inside the band was an engraving, small and fine.
H to R, forever is not long enough. June 1953.
R was Ruth. My Aunt Ruth, the poor spinster, the old maid we pitied for forty years, had been married in June of 1953, and not one soul in this family ever knew.
It took me weeks and an old cousin with a long memory to find the rest. His name was Harold. Ruth met him the summer she was nineteen, married him quiet at the courthouse in Manchester with two strangers for witnesses, and eleven weeks later Harold was killed in Korea, in the last months of it, before he ever came home, before there was a single photograph of the two of them together. Ruth was a widow at nineteen and she never told a living soul, because in 1953 a girl who married in a rush and lost him that fast got talked about, and Ruth decided she would rather be pitied as an old maid than have the family turn her one true marriage into gossip.
So she folded it all into a safe deposit box and let us feel sorry for her for forty years. Poor spinster Ruth, home to a cat and the TV. She was not a woman who never had love. She was a woman who had it so completely, so young, and lost it so fast, that no man after could measure up to a ghost, and she would not settle, so she chose to keep faith with Harold instead and let us think she simply had nobody.
She had somebody. She had him for eleven weeks and for the next sixty-nine years she carried his ring in a bank vault and his name behind a drugstore counter and never breathed a word.
I did not tell the whole family the way you tell gossip. I told it the way you tell a love story, at her graveside, with the ones who had come. I read the engraving out loud, H to R, forever is not long enough, and grown people who had pitied that woman their whole lives stood in the cemetery and wept for a love none of us had been trusted to see.
We put Harolds ring on a chain and it hangs on Ruths headstone marker now, and we had them add a line under her name that she never got to claim while she lived. Beloved wife of Harold. Sixty-nine years she waited to be called that out loud. It is the least a family can do, to finally say the true thing over a woman we spent so long feeling sorry for, when all along she was the great romance none of us was worthy to know about.