Because inside the hollow of it, packed in cotton batting, Walt had hidden my mother’s engagement ring.
That ring was sold in March of 1987.
My daddy was out of work eleven months that year and my mother took it to a place on Center Street in Kingsport and got a hundred and sixty dollars for it, and she came home and made supper and never mentioned it again in her life. I was twenty-two. I watched her do it from the car.
She died in 2009 with a bare hand.
I have said out loud in front of my husband maybe four times in forty years that I wished I knew where that ring went. Four times. He never once said anything back.
He’d been looking since 2019.
I know that because the receipt was in the bird with it. An estate dealer in Johnson City, and before that a woman in Erwin who’d had it since 1991, and there is a piece of notebook paper in there in Walt’s handwriting with six names and phone numbers on it and five of them crossed out.
Six years. A man who could not work a smartphone found a ring through six years of telephone calls to strangers.
He paid nine hundred and forty dollars for it. That is more money than my husband ever spent on anything in his life except a truck.
And a bluebird, because my mother kept a ceramic bluebird on her kitchen windowsill and I have got it in a box somewhere and I would not have thought about that in a hundred years standing there disappointed on my own anniversary.
Wrapped around the ring:
“Ada — you said it four times in forty years and I heard you every time. Sorry it took so long. I’m not much at hints but I’m all right at looking.”
Three weeks later I woke up next to a man who was already gone.
That bird sat on the high shelf almost a year because I could not stand to look at what I thought it was, and I broke it with a broom handle on a Tuesday morning, and I sat down on my own kitchen floor in the pieces of it.
The ring fits. It always did; my mother and I had the same hands.
The recliner’s in the front room. Nobody sits in it and I am not moving it.
I’ve got the pieces of that bird in a jar on the sill. A woman at church offered to glue it back together for me and I told her no, and I could not explain why, and I’m still not sure I can.
Sixty-two years old. Six years of phone calls. I had been so disappointed I didn’t even dust it.