“I can get behind that,” Maureen said.
“So if Nat starts the process of having him declared dead, which may involve looking for him, you’re okay with that.”
“I have one request,” Maureen said.
“What is it?”
“If you find him,” Maureen said, “don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Where he is, where he went when he left.”
“Believe me,” Amber said, “I don’t want to know those things, either.”
“Good,” Maureen said. There was one thing concerning her father, she realized, that she wanted to know. “So this is kind of a weird question.”
“Yes, we’re having sex,” Amber said. “We are consenting adults. We’re old, we’re not dead.”
“Oh. My. God. That was not what I was going to ask. At all.”
“Well, then,” Amber said, “what was your question?”
Maureen struggled to recapture the original thought. “Oh, I got it. Daddy’s ring, the wedding ring. You won’t wear it anymore, will you? Nat will give you a new one.”
“I stopped wearing it not too long after you left New York,” Amber said. “I think maybe I took it off after we got home from your academy graduation. I forget.”
That’s a lie, Maureen thought. Amber had worn that gold band for eighteen years after the man who’d given it to her was gone. Amber would remember not only the day, but also the hour she took off that ring.
Maureen waited, listening to her mother’s breathing through the phone, knowing Amber was carefully weighing what she would say next, and how much she would let it reveal.
Amber said, “It all, it seemed so much more over when you left. More final. Like that was really the end of me and you and … him.”
Maureen swallowed hard. “I never knew that.”
“Why would you?” Amber said. “Nothing would’ve changed if you did. And I didn’t even know I’d feel like that until after you were gone.”
“What did you do with the ring?”
“Why, do you want it?” Amber asked, forced brightness in her voice. She was wearying of the topic, Maureen could tell. “I know you don’t have much of his, not since you lost that coat.”
I didn’t quite lose it, Maureen thought. The hospital burned it because they couldn’t get Sebastian’s blood out of the wool. But, she thought, her mother’s point was the same. Her father’s coat was gone and she had nothing left of him but his last name.
“I don’t want that ring,” Maureen said. Except maybe to toss in a volcano. “It’s of no use to me.”
“Oh, okay, then. I guess it’s in a drawer somewhere. I can’t throw it out, I’m sure it’s worth something. Just not to me. Not anymore.”
10
Shortly after nine the following morning, Maureen was down in the Central Business District, sitting at a small table outside the PJ’s coffee shop on the corner of Camp and Girod Streets. Despite the day’s early hour, she felt more calm and clearheaded than she had any number of the past days when she’d slept much later, rolling around sore-legged and headachy in the tangled sheets into the early afternoon.
She lifted the lid off her paper cup and blew on her coffee, the rising steam fogging her sunglasses. She wore boots and jeans, and over a white thermal undershirt she’d pulled on a gray V-neck T-shirt featuring a gas lamp emblazoned with the name Kelcy Mae, a local singer-songwriter. She’d caught the show a couple of weeks ago, a good one, at a small bar in the Riverbend neighborhood called Carrollton Station. She didn’t remember buying the T-shirt after the show, which was fine; she liked the music and the band, and the shirt, but she didn’t remember the drive home, either. She didn’t remember much of anything after the fourth double Jameson, and that was a problem. At least she’d woken up alone that morning. Thank the Lord for small favors. She was looking forward to putting those days behind her.