“In California. Kern.”
“I’ve never been to California,” he said. “What is that look on your face?”
I held the ring tightly. “I had a ring just like this,” I said. “And I threw it in the Kern River. Last summer.”
“I’m sure it was a different ring.”
I opened my hand. The yellow stone deepened to orange in the upper right hemisphere; I used to call it 80 percent yellow, 20 percent orange. The same slightly tweaked setting: a band of silver, not quite symmetrical.
“I threw it in the Kern River as my way into adulthood.”
He wiped the petal off his cheek, and it drifted to the carpet. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nina gave me that ring off her finger five years ago and told me to keep it for her until her next visit.”
“But she couldn’t have had it five years ago,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was wearing it.”
“But that’s just what she did,” he said.
I closed my fist around the ring. “Come on! Is any of this Nina stuff even true?”
“Of course it’s true!” he said, and his face washed out a little, panicked. “That’s her ring.”
“But this is my ring, too!” I waved it in the air. “Down to the scratch on the inside! Down to the shape of the stone!”
He shrank against the side of the bed. Meekly, he said something about how she’d taken it off her finger, and how she’d bought it at a street fair in Cairo, and how she didn’t like to use a calendar to make plans, and his words were trembling but insistent, and I had no idea if Nina was real, or never born, or if there could be two rings exactly the same, and he finished what he was saying and slumped down against the bedspread and closed his eyes.
“She told me to keep it for her for a while,” he said, in a low, hollow voice.
From outside came the distant sound of an owl. I slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit, just as it had fit before. Slightly loose, but held in place by the knuckle.
“I bought this ring at a sidewalk sale in Fresno,” I said. “In high school. Age fifteen. And I wore it for five years. And then last summer I was on a trip with my family, and I threw it in the Kern River because it was finally time to grow up. I kissed the stone, said goodbye to being a kid, and threw it in. Then I cried a little and went back to join everybody.”
I twisted it on my finger, as I had for years.
“Here it is again,” I said.
“Do you want to keep it for now?” he asked, in a tired voice.
“No.”
I slid down the door frame to sit on the carpet. I closed my eyes, too. “I’m not Nina.”
“No,” he said.
“I’m Claire,” I said.
“Howard.”
We let the names fill the room.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I sat there for a while and maybe even fell asleep again for a few minutes. When I woke up, I went to his bathroom and splashed water on my face. Went to his bedroom and returned the ring to the drawer with the nail clipper. Went back to the doorway of the smaller bedroom. His head was resting on the bed of petals, and his eyes were open. He looked a little older now, heavier, quiet.
“Here.” I picked up the book of Ohio flora. “Here, Howard. Come on. Let’s put them back.”
We spent the next half hour placing six petals per page, alongside photos of Ohio marigolds and chestnuts and elms. Many of the petals had crunched into triangles on the floor; those we swept up and put into one of the empty drawers.
After we were done, he walked me downstairs, out onto the porch, and down the steps into the star-clear coldness of night. It must have been two or three in the morning.
“Thank you for the lightbulb change,” he said.
“Thanks for the tea.”
He nodded. We looked out past the dirt lot to a road beyond where the houses ended. It was a road that no one drove on unless they were very specifically going to either the recycling plant where Hank had been headed or to the Russian grocery complex. Another owl hoot came rolling at us from far away.
“One more thing,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. His voice was still low, but for some reason, now that we were out of the house, it sounded less wavery and broken than it had upstairs; its reediness reminded me of wind whistling, like its own sound now instead of a diminishment.
“Yes?”
“Drop the documentary filmmaker,” he said. “Go to Arlene. Stay friends with Arlene.”
I shrank under his hand. “What?”
“He’s in there rolling his film, cutting and rolling, and never thinks of you,” the old man said. “Not once. Not ever. She is thinking of everyone. She is a good friend. A good friend is rare. Go to her. Ed loves Arlene because she is a good person. He may have a friend, someone you’ll like. Go to Ed, ask him. Ask her. Eat dinner with them. Bury vegetables. Why not?”
He stood straighter. In the far distance, headlights rounded a corner, coming our way.
“What?” I said again, sharp.
“You don’t have to start with a hundred people having sex,” he said.
I watched the headlights come closer, the approach of big metal-music inside. I could have stepped into the street, flagged down the car, and asked for a ride home. The headlights illuminated the man, his elderly hunch. Then it was gone.
“Have you been stalking me?”
“No,” he said, smiling a little. “You found my door, remember?”
“Did you look in my purse?”
“You don’t have a purse,” he said, which was true.
“Did you hunt down my ring?”
“You threw it in the river,” he said. “How would I do that?”
I couldn’t think up an answer. “Is this what all the air pushing was for?”
He sniffed.
“Or the tea?” I asked.
“Is just good plain barley tea.” He slapped his arms from the cold, and we stared into the night together.
“By the way,” I said, “it’s Fred.”
“Fred?”
“Arlene’s guy. Is Fred, not Ed,” I said, smiling at the ground.
“Fred?” he said, nodding, frowning. Then he patted my shoulder goodbye and turned to let himself back in.
When I arrived back home, Arlene was up, making late-night waffles. She did this sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Her face was scrubbed clean, and she looked smaller, and about ten times more vulnerable, without that blush on her cheeks and careful mascara.
“Hey,” she whispered when I came in.
She was whisking batter in a bowl and soon would be pouring it into the new waffle iron her father had sent from his kitchen supply store in Asheville. As on most evenings, she was wearing her oldest pink bathrobe, with embroidered suns on each lapel. Her mother had embroidered those suns there, as a gift to Arlene before college. Arlene, unlike most people our age, wore it with pride. She had moved past and through its symbolism, and now to her it was just a nice bathrobe.
I leaned on the cabinets, next to her. I could hear the steady, hunky breathing of Fred in the next room.
“How was your night?”
“Okay,” I said.
She looked up, whisk in hand, brow furrowed.
“I went to a war protest.”
“There was another one?” she said, disappointed.
“A bad one,” I said. “A fake. I saw a hundred people have sex and then get their wallets lifted.”
“No kidding?”
“And then I had tea with an old man who had dredged a river.”