Wade got it loose and unwrapped it right there on the floor, and then he said, real low and real quiet, for me to come look, and I got down beside him, and it was a ring. A thin gold wedding band, worn down with the years, tucked in a sandwich bag with a little bundle of letters tied up in string, the paper gone soft and yellow with age.
The letters were love letters, the old kind, dated back to the nineteen fifties, between a Harold and a June. Sweet, shy, careful letters, a young man courting a young woman the slow way they did it back then. And the ring, when I held it up to the light, had something engraved inside the band, worn near smooth. H and J, and a date.
I could have kept that ring. I will be straight with you, we needed it. Two little ones, Dustin between jobs, forty dollars was a stretch for the washer to begin with. But you do not keep a thing like that. You just do not. So I set about finding who it belonged to.
The fella who sold me the washer, it turned out, had sold off a whole houseful, quick and cheap, on behalf of his daddy. His father was Harold. June had passed the year before, and not long after, his mind had started to go, the fast kind, and the family had moved him into a memory care place there in Florence and cleared the house out in a single weekend. Nobody had any notion the ring was in the washing machine. They thought it had been lost, or worse, thought maybe someone had taken it, and it had grieved the daughter something awful, one more piece of her mother gone.
I drove the ring and the letters over to her myself. She cried right there on her porch. And then she asked would I come with her to give it to her daddy, seeing as I was the one who found it, and I said I would, though I felt I had no business in the middle of something so tender.
Harold did not know his own daughter most days by then. He sat by the window not saying much, gone off somewhere the rest of us could not follow. His daughter knelt down and put the ring in his hand and told him soft what it was. And for a minute, nothing. And then something came up in his face, like a light coming back on down a long dark hall, and he closed his hand around that ring and he said, clear as a bell, the first clear thing he had said in weeks, June. There is my June. I thought I had lost her.
His daughter read him one of the letters, one he had written June sixty-some years ago, and he mouthed some of the words along with her, remembering a thing from all the way back even as the near things kept slipping away from him. They had that afternoon together. One good clear afternoon, handed back to them by a ring hidden in a forty-dollar washing machine and a family too broke to be too broke to do the right thing.
We did not take a dime, though the daughter tried her best to press it on us. Some things you just do not put a price on. Dustin found steady work about three weeks later, and we are alright now. And I would buy that rattly old washer again a hundred times over for one look at his face when his June came back to him, even just for an afternoon.