At my husband’s Christmas party, his 26-year-old assistant raised a toast wearing my grandmother’s sapphire ring. The ring vanished from my jewelry box in March. Gerald said the cleaning lady must have taken it. I let her go after nine years. She cried in my driveway . Now that ring sparkled under the office lights. I walked over. The girl smiled and held out her hand like I should admire it. “Gerald says it’s a promise ring. For after the divorce.” Divorce. Nobody had told me. I said nothing. I drove home, opened his desk, and found the ring’s old velvet box. Inside was a folded paper in my grandmother’s handwriting. I read the first line and started to laugh , because it said.
“To whoever is reading this: the stone is blue glass. The real sapphire paid for our farm in 1958. If you stole this ring, you stole a forty-dollar lie. If you are my granddaughter, you already know the real treasure was never on your finger.”
I sat in Gerald’s leather chair and laughed until I cried. Then I stopped crying, because I am seventy-one years old and I have learned that tears are for people who have nothing left to do.
I had plenty to do.
Grandma Ruth had told me about the glass stone when I was sixteen. She made me promise never to tell anyone, not even my husband. “Let them think you’re rich,” she said, winking. “It keeps a woman interesting.” I had forgotten the note was in the box. Gerald clearly never unfolded it. He just grabbed the ring and left the paper behind, the way he left everything behind that didn’t shine.
That night I did something I had never done in forty-four years of marriage. I logged into our bank accounts myself.
There it was. Eighty-two thousand dollars moved out of our savings since spring. A hotel in Naples. A car lease I didn’t recognize. A jeweler’s invoice for “resizing, one sapphire ring.” Gerald had paid ninety dollars to resize glass.
I called my lawyer, Barbara, at seven the next morning. She has been my friend since college and she does not waste words.
“Marietta, whose name is on the company?”
“Mine,” I said. “My father’s, then mine. Gerald is vice president. I’m the majority shareholder. Sixty percent.”
There was a long silence on the line. Then Barbara said, “Oh, honey. He forgot that too, didn’t he?”
He had. Gerald had run my father’s hardware supply company for twenty years, and somewhere along the way he started believing it was his. He gave the speeches. He shook the hands. I signed the papers once a year at the kitchen table and never asked questions. That was my mistake, and I own it.
But it was still my company.
I didn’t confront him. Not yet. On Christmas morning I cooked his favorite ham. I gave him a sweater. He gave me a gift card to a spa and kissed my cheek like I was an aunt. His phone buzzed all through dinner. I passed him the potatoes.
On December 28th, Kaylee — that was the assistant’s name — took the ring to a jeweler at the mall to have it appraised. I know this because the jeweler was a young man named Tomás who had gone to school with my nephew, and he called me, very politely, to ask if I knew a woman was walking around with what she claimed was “Mrs. Colburn’s family sapphire.”
“What did you tell her it was worth?” I asked.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I told her the band is ten-karat gold and the stone is glass. Maybe sixty dollars, if she’s lucky.”
I’m told Kaylee screamed in the middle of the food court.
By New Year’s Eve, she had sent Gerald forty-one text messages. Barbara got copies of every one through the divorce discovery later. The kindest one said, “You told me your wife was rich and the ring was worth $20,000. You lied about EVERYTHING.” The cruelest one I won’t repeat, but it was about his hairline.
She quit on January 2nd. She left the ring on his desk with a sticky note that said “Keep your junk.”
