I opened the manila envelope from the law firm in Phoenix and laid its contents on the kitchen counter beside the photograph of the emerald ring. There were four items. The first was a cashier check made payable to Deborah, in the amount of fourteen thousand, two hundred dollars. The second was a plain white box tied with ribbon. The third was a letter on heavy paper, signed by a detective in the Mesa police department. The fourth was a closing statement for the sale of Reyes Heating and Air, Incorporated, showing a figure at the bottom that made my wife put her hand to her chest. Twelve million dollars. She sat down on the stool without a word.
“Open the box, Deb,” I said. She untied the ribbon with shaking fingers, and she lifted the lid. In a nest of tissue paper lay the emerald ring of her mother, and beside it a string of pearls, and beside the pearls a gold watch with a cracked crystal. The watch of her first husband. She held the ring against her cheek, and I watched the tears start. “How…” she said. “I went to the pawn shop on Main Street on Monday,” I said. “I paid off all eleven tickets. The owner is a decent man named Walt, and he was ashamed once he understood what had happened. He had asked Kyle for identification each time, and Kyle always had it.”
Kyle had not moved from the end of the kitchen table. He had been leaning back in his chair, arms folded, wearing the smirk he has worn since the day we met. Now the smirk had gone sour. “That is not fair,” he said. “You had no right. That jewelry belongs to my mother.” “It does,” I said. “That is why it is going home to her.” I handed him the letter. “Detective Alvarez asked me to give you this personally. She would like you to call her by noon tomorrow, or she will come to your apartment. You will want to bring a lawyer.”
A manila envelope opened on a kitchen counter returned the jewelry that a stepson had pawned and showed what the repairman really owned.
Deborah had not taken her eyes from her son. She is a gentle woman, quiet as a dove, and I have never heard her raise her voice. “Kyle,” she said, very low. “Did you tell me my husband had a girlfriend in Tucson?” He shrugged, and then he tried to laugh. “Mom, I knew you were never going to leave him. It was just to keep you from trusting him. I thought if you were close to me again…” He stopped, hearing himself. “You made up a woman,” said Deborah slowly, “so that I would give you the ring of my mother. You forged those transfers on your phone. You sat at my table and let me cry myself to sleep for two weeks.”
Kyle looked, for a moment, almost like a child. “Mom, I owed money. I was going to get it all back.” “To whom?” I asked. He named a man, and then another man, and then a figure, and the figure was not fourteen thousand dollars. It was sixty one thousand. Deborah closed her eyes. I let the silence lie for a time. Then I said, as evenly as I could, “Kyle, I am going to say something, and I want you to listen to all of it. I have not forgotten that you stole from your mother, or that you tried to put me out of this house. But she loves you, and I love her, and so I am going to give you one chance.”
I told him my terms. He would call Detective Alvarez in the morning and cooperate fully, which meant a restitution agreement and probably probation. He would enter a thirty day program in Scottsdale for gambling debts, and I would pay for it. He would not live in our house, and he would not come to our door unless he was sober. And he would sign a paper, in front of a notary, withdrawing every false statement he had made about me.
Kyle stared at me. “Why would you do this for me?” he asked hoarsely. “I did it for your mother,” I said. “But if you do the work, I will do it for you as well.”
He left that night, with his head down, carrying a paper bag with a sandwich Deborah had made him. At the door he turned. “Frank,” he said. It was the first time he had ever said my name without a sneer. “I am sorry. I do not know how to say it right.” I told him he did not have to say it right. He just had to say it again, in six months, and mean it. Deborah stood at the window watching his taillights until they disappeared, and then she turned around and put her arms around me, the ring still clutched in her fist, and held on until my shirt was wet.
The program was hard on him. He called Deborah on the third day and begged to leave, and she told him gently to stay. He called on the ninth and said nothing at all, and she listened on the line for twenty minutes to his breathing. On the thirtieth day he came home for a weekend visit, thin and polite, and he washed my van in the driveway without being asked. He paid the first of his debts that spring. It will take him years to rebuild, and he knows it, and when he stops at the house now he takes off his boots at the door.
In April, as I had promised her, we flew to Italy. We stayed in a small hotel in Orvieto with a balcony over the olive groves, and Deborah wore the emerald of her mother on her right hand. In the evening she sat in the golden light with a glass of wine and said, “Frank, I never believed I would see this place.” I told her that for nine years I had been waiting for the day she would say it. On the last night she slid the ring onto my smallest finger as far as it would go, which was the first knuckle, and we laughed until the waiter came to see what was the matter.