Wrapped in that rag was a small velvet box, and when I thumbed it open there was a ring inside, a little diamond gone cloudy with fifty years of dust, and a scrap of paper folded down to nothing. My hands started shaking because I knew that handwriting. It belonged to Petey Malloran, one of the five of us, thick as thieves, and one of the ones who is gone now.
The note was short. For Donna, when I get back. Ask her at the Holiday, where I first saw her.
Petey never got back. He shipped out the fall of 1969 and he came home under a flag the following spring, and in all the years since, not one of us ever knew he had been carrying a ring. He had hidden it in the cowboy pinball, the machine we all lived in front of, meaning to come home and pull it out and get down on one knee right there by the pop machine and ask Donna Krebs to marry him.
Donna Krebs, who I kissed once, at sixteen, and never thought much more about. I got the kiss. Petey, it turned out, had given her his whole quiet heart and told no living soul, and then he went and died before he could spend it, and his ring sat behind that coin box for fifty years waiting on a wedding that never came.
I could have kept it. Sold it, even. Instead I did the only thing a man can do with a thing like that. I found Donna.
She is Donna Whitfield now, widowed, over in the next county, seventy-some and sharp as ever. I sat in her kitchen and put Petey ring and Petey note on the table in front of her, and I watched fifty years rearrange themselves behind her eyes.
He never said a word to me. Not one word. All that time I thought nobody had ever loved me like that, and somebody had, and he was too shy to let me know before the world took him.
She held that ring a long time. She told me things about Petey I never knew, small things, the way he watched her across the lanes, the way he always had a quarter ready when she wanted to play. Fifty years late, a boy finally got to tell a girl he loved her, through a dusty ring and a rag and a friend who happened to buy the right pinball machine.
The machine is restored now, cowboy on the glass, balls rumbling down clean. But that is not the part that matters. Petey has been gone since 1970, and this year, at last, the thing he could not say got said. Donna keeps the ring on a chain. She told me she wears the boyhood love of a good man who never came home, and that at her age, that is about the finest thing a person can have around their neck.