Sheriff Tom Brannon hugged me in my own backyard in front of Ricks whole family, and then he turned to my husband and said, Richard, I worked with your father-in-law for twenty-two years, and this young man here is from the pawn shop on Nicholasville Road.
The young man opened the small black velvet box. My grandmothers ring. Mine-cut diamond, platinum, 1938. The only thing I had left of her, back in the box where it belonged.
My daddy was a deputy in Fayette County for thirty-one years, and his old partner Tom never forgot the girl he used to bounce on his knee. When I called him from the pawn shop parking lot that Friday, shaking, I did not even have to ask. He drove to the shop, confirmed the ring, and because Rick had pawned it with a forged statement that it was his to sell, there was paperwork to be done that Rick was not going to enjoy.
His mother said I had finally learned my place. My place, it turned out, was standing next to a sheriff while my grandmothers ring came home.
Since Easter I had kept a little spiral notebook in my Bible. Dates. Times. What he said. What he broke. The coffee down the wallpaper I hung myself in 2009. It was all in there, in my own hand, and a deputys daughter knows exactly what a record like that is worth.
Ricks mother stopped smirking. His sisters stopped laughing. Nobody passed the deviled eggs.
I filed that week. The notebook became an exhibit. The forged pawn statement became a charge. And a protective order made sure I would never again end up backed against a counter while jars rattled on a shelf.
I put my grandmothers ring on my own right hand, where no one will ever pawn it again, and I made her banana pudding one last time, for me, with the wafers standing up all around the edge the way she taught me.
Then I packed the trifle bowl, and the ring, and my Bible with the notebook in it, and I went somewhere Rick and his mother will never learn my place again.