Forty minutes into my husband’s funeral reception, still in the black dress I had worn to bury him three hours earlier, I opened the little blue velvet box on my own mantel to show my grandson his grandfather’s wedding ring, and inside, where the ring should have been, was a yellow price tag from a pawn shop forty-three miles away.
I did not gasp. I did not drop the box. I have thought a great deal, in the months since, about why I did not do either of those things, and I have decided it is because some part of me, some old and tired and unsurprised part, had already been expecting to be robbed of something. I had just assumed it would be my composure, or my appetite, or my sleep. I had not thought to guard a ring.
My name is Idella Renner. I was sixty-eight years old on the day I am telling you about, and I had been married to Silas Renner for forty-nine years, one month short of fifty. We were going to have a party for the fiftieth. Kendra, my daughter, had already called the Grange hall to hold the date. Silas used to joke that he was only sticking around another year so he would not have to hear the end of my speech about it.
He did not get the year.
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Silas died on a Tuesday morning in the machine shed behind our house, seventeen days before I found that price tag. He had gone out at quarter to six, the way he had gone out at quarter to six for as long as I had known him, to look at the baler before the day got hot. I found him at six fifteen, sitting down against the tire of the tractor like a man who had decided to rest a minute, and by the time the paramedics from Hollis Creek got out our lane it had already been too long. The doctor at the hospital used the words “massive” and “likely instant,” and I have held onto those two words the way you hold onto a railing in the dark, because the alternative, that he lay there afraid and alone for even one minute I could have shortened, is a thing I cannot let myself think about for very long.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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