Inheritance by Baynard Woods

Author:Baynard Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Mom took the ring off her finger, a small diamond set in rose gold that had rubbed against her wedding band for nearly thirty years.

We were standing in the kitchen, and she held the ring up to the light streaming in through the window above the sink.

“I’ve always loved how imperfect the cut of the diamond is,” she said.

She handed it to me, and I held it up in the same way, the light refracting off the odd angles of the jewel.

“Grandmother Woods told me that it had been in the family for seven generations,” she said. “They had to cut the diamonds by hand back then.”

I did the math in my head. So the ring I was holding had been in my family—had in some ways created my family, bringing two disparate lines together to form a new generation—for something like 210 years, or since 1791. This ring was roughly as old as the United States Constitution.

“And Grandmother gave it to Dad to give to you?” I asked.

“And I’m giving it to you,” she said. “To give to Nicole.”

My first year of graduate school in Pittsburgh had passed like a dream where I sat in a grim and dusty, cold apartment that I’d sublet, reading and pining for Nicole. She was still two thousand miles away, and we had seen each other only twice that year. But it was going to be easier the next year, though we would still be apart, because she had been accepted into a PhD program in Maryland, which was much closer to Pittsburgh. So the minute school was out, I caught a plane to Albuquerque, from which we would make a couple of trips back and forth to South Carolina before her move.

We had been about to drive back to Albuquerque from South Carolina to finish moving Nicole’s stuff when I told Mom and Dad that I was going to ask her to marry me, and now, just before we left, Mom had pulled me aside.

“When are you going to ask her?” she asked after she gave me the ring.

“I think I’m going to do it when we’re on the road at some really cool place,” I said.

“Don’t lose it,” she said, pointing to the ring.

“I’m terrified of that,” I said. “I kind of just want to give it to her now.”

“You will do it at the right time,” she said.

She hugged me again.

“I’m delighted for you to marry her,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

She got a little box for the ring, and I put it in my pocket.

“We better hit the road,” I said.

We walked out into the early-summer morning, where Dad and Nicole were standing by her Ford Taurus, whose silver paint job reflected the blue Carolina sky.

“Another great year at the rock,” Dad said. The pull of belonging was strong and Dad and Nicole and I had camped out for the race with Larry again that Memorial Day weekend at the same campsite and ended up drinking with the same people as the year before.

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