My sister. The only person who knew where his daughter was, was my sister.
The old man was named Walter Brandt. He sat in his wheelchair holding that ring and told me the rest while an aide brought us both a cup of coffee.
His wife, June, got sick in 2002. My sister Jeanie was her hospice nurse. For eight months she came to that house three times a week, and she and June got close the way people do when there is no time left to be polite.
Walter and June had a daughter named Susan. There had been a terrible fight in the late eighties. Walter said it was his fault, and he said it without me asking. Susan moved away and cut them off. June never stopped writing to her. The letters came back.
Before she died, June took off her wedding ring and pressed it into the hand of Jeanie. She asked her to find Susan and give it to her, and tell her that her mother never stopped loving her. Walter heard her promise.
Then Jeanie moved to another agency, and Walter lost track of her.
I drove home from Sedalia and went straight to the house. Tom let me go through her things. I found it in the drawer of her nightstand. A spiral notebook. Twenty years of notes. Dead end addresses. A post office in Oregon. A church in Idaho. And on the last page, written this past spring, a name and a phone number in Boise, with two words underlined twice. Found her.
My sister spent twenty years keeping a promise to a dying woman, and she found her daughter two months before she died.
Tom stood in the doorway while I read it. He said he knew she was wearing a ring that was not hers. He said he was afraid to ask whose it was. He thought maybe it meant something he did not want to know. That was why he kept telling me to stop.
I showed him the notebook. He sat down on the bed and put his face in his hands. She had been wearing it to keep it safe until she could hand it over. That was all.
I called the number. Susan answered. She said she had talked to my sister twice on the phone and they had plans to meet in July. She had wondered why Jeanie stopped calling.
Susan flew into Kansas City two weeks later. I picked her up and drove her to Sedalia. She walked into that care home and stood in the doorway of the room where her father lay for a long time before he saw her.
He held out the ring. His hands were shaking. He said, your mother wanted you to have this.
She put it on. It fit.
They had seven weeks. She stayed the whole time. She was there when he passed, holding his hand, wearing the ring her mother wore.
At the service, she found me and Tom in the back row. She said she would never have come home if not for Jeanie.
My sister did not get to finish it. So we finished it for her.