How much did you pay him for it, Kayla said to Tony, the emerald ring already off her finger and in my hand.
The champagne glasses had stopped clinking. Engraved inside the band, in tiny old letters, were five words. For Claire, love always, Nana. My name is Claire. It was my grandmothers ring, left to me when I was nineteen, kept in a blue box in my jewelry drawer that I had not opened in a month.
My husband had taken my dead grandmothers ring out of my own drawer and sold it to his brother so that Tony could propose with it at my fortieth birthday dinner, the dinner Brian told me I was too old to want.
Tony looked at Brian. Brian stared at his plate. And then Tony answered Kaylas question, because he was, I think, as stunned as the rest of us. Eight hundred dollars, Tony said. He told me it was our grandmothers, from our side. He said it had been in the family for years and he wanted it to stay in the family. I believed him. He is my brother.
Eight hundred dollars. My husband had sold my grandmother, the woman who raised me on Sundays, who put that ring in my hand when I was nineteen and told me to give it to someone who deserved me, for eight hundred dollars, to dress up his brothers proposal and steal my birthday in the same night.
My father stood up from the end of the table. He had given my grandmother that ring money himself, decades ago, and he knew that engraving by heart.
Brian finally spoke. Claire never even wears it, he said. I did not think she would notice.
I did not wear it because you do not wear a thing like that to the grocery store. You keep it in a blue box and you take it out on the hard days and you hold it and you remember who loved you. That is what it is for. Not noticing is not the same as not mattering, and only a certain kind of man confuses the two.
Kayla, to her great credit, did not want a stolen ring. She had slid it off her own finger the moment she read my name inside it. She put it in my hand and she said she was sorry, and she meant it, and none of this was hers.
Tony got his eight hundred dollars back from Brian, eventually, and he bought Kayla a ring that was actually theirs, and they are, last I heard, doing fine, which is more than I can say for the brother who sold mine.
Brian and I are done. A man who reaches into your jewelry drawer and sells the one thing your grandmother left you, to save his brother a few dollars and to put you in your place on your own birthday, is not confused about what he values. He is just counting on you not to notice.
I noticed. I turned the band. I read her name.
The ring is back in its blue box, where it belongs, and someday I will give it to someone who deserves me, exactly as my grandmother said. It will not be anyone who thinks eight hundred dollars is what she was worth.