What she slipped into my coat pocket was my mother’s old wedding ring.
I hadn’t seen it in almost twenty years.
My parents divorced when I was eleven, and one day my mom suddenly stopped wearing it. She told me she pawned it to help pay bills after my dad left. A few years later she got sick, and by the time I was in my twenties, she barely remembered half the stories she used to tell.
I ran back into the parking lot looking for the woman, but she was already gone.
All I had was the bakery receipt taped to the cake box. It had a first name handwritten on it: Renee.
I sat in my car for almost an hour before finally driving to the address on the receipt because something about the ring made my stomach feel wrong.
The woman who opened the door looked just as shocked to see me.
Turns out Renee was my mother’s hospice nurse years ago. My mom gave her that ring the week before she died because she was convinced somebody in our family had stolen the original and replaced it with a fake decades earlier.
Renee said my mother kept repeating one thing near the end.
“Tell my son his father knew.”