Two Rings
Chapter 13 - Two Rings
The jeweler Victoria chose was an elderly man on East 59th Street, a third-generation craftsman whose grandfather had made pieces for families like the Rosewoods during the period when the original ring had been commissioned, and who looked at the original ring Victoria brought to him with the specific recognition of someone encountering a very old acquaintance.
"Eighteen-karat gold, rose-cut ruby," he said, turning it carefully under his loupe. "I believe this was made in the shop I work in now. My grandfather's books would have the original commission record."
He found it, in a leather-bound volume from 1956, a single entry in his grandfather's handwriting: Two rings, Rosewood family, Mrs. Catherine. Gold rose setting, ruby center, family engraving inside.
He looked up from the book.
"Two rings," Victoria said.
"Two were commissioned," the jeweler confirmed. "I have only one record of a delivery, though. Perhaps the second was commissioned but not completed."
Or perhaps, Victoria thought, the second was completed and delivered with a different infant to a different family in Pittsburgh, and then worn quietly for decades by a woman who had grown up in a row house knowing she came from somewhere else but not precisely where.
She arranged for a duplicate to be made, identical in every detail, with one exception, the engraving on the inside of the new ring. The original read: For my daughters. Rosewood. 1956. The new ring read: For my sister. Clara. 2024.
She gave it to Clara at a small dinner, just the two of them and Lily, in Victoria's new apartment, six months after the day they'd sat on that bench in the park.
Clara opened the small box and sat looking at the ring for a considerable time without speaking, the specific speechlessness of someone whose emotional processing system has temporarily exceeded its capacity.
"Put it on," Lily instructed, from across the table.
Clara put it on.
She held her hand next to Victoria's, the two rings side by side, gold roses with ruby centers, one old and one new, both belonging to the same family by the right they'd always had.
"Your grandmother made two of these in 1956," Victoria said. "One for each daughter. I think she intended them to be together eventually. It just took longer than she expected."
Clara looked at her sister with an expression that Victoria was still learning the language of, the particular way Clara's face moved when she was feeling something she hadn't fully found words for yet.
Lily, who had no such difficulty with words, said: "It's really pretty. Can we have dessert now."
Both women laughed, sudden and genuine, and the tension that had been coiled through the entire small ceremony of ring-giving released completely in one moment of a nine-year-old's practical appetites, and the evening continued, easier and warmer than any dinner Victoria had hosted in the new apartment so far.
She looked at Clara, later, after Lily had fallen asleep on the sofa with a throw blanket pulled up to her chin, and said: "She's extraordinary."
"She really is," Clara agreed. "She's also completely ungovernable, which is something that's easier to appreciate in theory than in practice at six in the morning."
"I look forward to experiencing that firsthand eventually," Victoria said.
Clara looked at her. "You're going to be a good aunt."
"I'm going to try," Victoria said. "That's all I can promise right now. That I'm going to try."
May you like
Clara reached out and briefly squeezed her sister's hand, the same long fingers, the same slight width across the knuckles, the new ring catching the same light as the old one.
"That," Clara said, "is more than enough."
