Fiction Wednesday

I proclaim this Fiction Wednesday while I think of other things to write about. I apologize if you'd heard this short already.

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The Ring

Diana hadn’t wanted to wear her gloves tonight. They fit too tightly over the already too-tight ring. But even though the snug leather fingers are embedding its odd bulk deeper into her flesh, even though her parents would certainly recognize the outsized bulge on her left hand and probably not be happy, she promises Ted that she won’t remove them until he can find a parking space and meet her at her parent’s townhouse.

She’s barely out of Ted’s car with the chocolate torte they’d picked up for dessert when she sees her mother at the door, pinch-lipped and overdressed, ushering her in out of the cold.

A football game blares from the wall of television across the room. Diana’s father doesn’t budge from his lounge chair. “Hey, Angelcake. Cop a squat, we’re down by two.”

“Jack, please.” With a tight smile, Iris Montgomery takes the box from Diana’s hands. “We have guests.”

“Guests, what guests?” Jack says. “It’s just Diana and what’s his name.”

Diana’s stomach sinks. “His name is Ted, Daddy.”

Iris shakes her head apologetically at Diana—who has managed to remove her coat and hat but is still wearing her scarf and gloves—then gives her husband an exasperated huff. “At least turn down the volume. For God’s sake—”

“All right, all right!” Jack Montgomery shifts his bulk dyspeptically and reaches for the remote control. Scowling, he stabs it at the television. The picture dissolves into a pinpoint of blue light. “There. Happy?”

Iris Montgomery, queen of the dismissive gesture, is just about to perform what Diana’s father calls the Indignant Pivot - a nostril flare with a half-turn toward the kitchen on one expensive but practical shoe - when there’s a rap at the front door.

And in the threshold stands Diana’s brand-new fiancé, handsome, pink-cheeked and shiny-eyed from the cold. Apparently, it has started to snow. Several large flakes are melting into his blow-dried blond hair.

My fiancé.

The words sound foreign and exciting. Like something Diana has dreamed up, a girlish scrawl in a notebook margin. Mrs. Blisko. Mrs. Theodore Blisko, Junior. Diana Montgomery Blisko. She hadn’t done that with Alex. Or maybe she had. Their engagement wasn’t that long ago, but it had all turned so bleak so fast that she’d tried to put the whole thing out of her mind.

“Nice weather.” Ted brushes snowflakes from his faux cashmere scarf. “Hello, Iris.” He leans over to kiss her upturned cheek. “Jack. Thought you’d be watching the game.”

Her father merely grunts from his chair.

“You know where to put your things, Ted,” Iris says. “Dinner’s going to be a while. Maybe we’d all like some tea?”

Ted warms up his salesman’s smile. “Let me give you a hand with that.”

Diana’s mother blinks, prettily flustered. Manicured fingers reach for the strand of pearls falling into the collar of her blouse.

“Oh...but you only just got here. You work so hard during the week, all that travelling...”

“No.” Ted thrusts his coat and scarf in Diana’s direction. “I insist.”

Diana watches them go, the grace note of her mother’s laughter disappearing into the kitchen. Feeling once again like the little fat girl left standing in the middle of the gymnasium floor after everyone else had chosen up sides. The little fat girl left waiting at the altar. Then she sighs, and hangs Ted’s coat in the closet, smoothing it straight, tucking in his scarf and draping her own over the top of it so it won’t snag on the other hangers.

Her father picks up a magazine. “You cold?”

Diana’s gaze drifts to her still-gloved hands. Ted has come and gone. Now what? Wait for the appropriate moment, she supposes.

“I’ll warm up in a few minutes.”

She perches on the edge of the couch, beside her father’s chair. He continues reading. Her hands, resting on her thighs, feel ungainly as canoe paddles, manatee flippers, pterodactyl wings. So the ring is a bit...over the top, as her mother might say. So it’s unusual. Unique. But that’s not what really matters, is it? What matters is the intention. She could do worse than Ted. So he isn’t the most intellectual man in the world. So his family doesn’t have any money, and his father...well, they don’t have to talk about his father, not yet. But unlike Alex, Ted has a job, ambition, and her parents seem to be getting along with him well enough. And he’d worked hard, hard enough to buy a house. It’s small, but it’s his very own house, with matching dishes and everything, and how many young, single men can she say that about? She would have said yes to Ted if he put a cigar band around her finger.

So what is she waiting for? She’d only promised to keep her gloves on until Ted arrived. Casually, she works them off. The right one first, finger by finger, like an old-fashioned striptease artist, and then the left. But something has happened to the ring. Oh, it’s still there, all right. So tight that she fears she might never be able to remove it. But it doesn’t look as shiny and magical as it had when Ted slipped it (no, wedged it) on her finger earlier that afternoon. Somehow, without Ted to turn the oddness of the setting into a positive, without Ted to say that there’s nothing else like it in the world, it has changed from “unusual” and “unique” to “what the hell had he been thinking.”

Aside from being far too small (an honest mistake, she tells herself, what do men know about women’s ring sizes?), it’s black. A giant black onyx stone with a round diamond embedded in its center. And on each side, tiny diamonds forming the shape of interlocking horseshoes.

“For good luck,” Ted had told her, forcing a hopeful smile.

She’d said that the tears were because she was so happy. And she is. She truly is. But this ring...

“Daddy...” Ted would forgive her. She can’t tell her mother, not yet. Imagining the apprehension on her face at having to prepare for yet another wedding with another groom who might find that there’s someplace more important he needs to be on the day of the ceremony makes Diana’s stomach clench. But she can do no wrong by her father. Her heart pounds. She feels the pulse throbbing beneath the too-tight ring. “Ted and I...there’s something I need to tell you...we’re...we’re...well, we wanted to wait and tell you both together, but...”

Jack Montgomery turns. Gives his only daughter a level gaze, his thin lips tightening, air leaking through them like an old balloon. “I may be retired, Angelcake, but I haven’t lost it yet. I know what it means when my daughter shows up with another diamond ring on her left hand.” He peers over his glasses for a closer look. “Wouldn’t be my first choice for a setting, but I’m a traditional kind of guy.”

Diana slips her right hand over her left.

“It’s been, what, not even a year, since...?”

“A year and a half,” Diana says.

“And you’ve been with this one...?”

“Three months.”

“Look, honey, you know I can’t tell you what to do—“

“But you think this is a mistake.”

He sucks in a breath. “I’m just saying...what’s the rush?”

Diana bites the inside of her lip to hold back the tears. “I’m not getting any younger, Daddy, and in case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly knocking down my door.”

“Stop that,” he says under his breath. “You just stop feeling sorry for yourself right now. You’re a beautiful girl. You lost that baby fat, what? Years ago. You just have to...I don’t know, get out more. Talk to people. You don’t have to settle for the first guy who—“

“But I thought you liked Ted!”

“Yeah, all right, he seems OK, doesn’t have his head up his ass like that other one. I just want you to make sure you’re doing this for the right reasons. If he really loves you, he’ll wait more than three goddamned months.”

Diana tries to worry the now ridiculous ring around her finger, but it won’t budge. “Why waste time waiting,” Ted had told her, when he slipped it - no, jammed it on, “when you already know what you want?”

This is what she wants. A practical man. A man with matching dishes. A man who wants her. And no matter what her father says, there will always be a little fat girl inside her who is convinced that if she passes one up, there might never be another.

“Diana?” Ted calls from the kitchen. “Milk or lemon?”

“Neither, thanks.” She avoids her father’s knowing gaze. How can he possibly expect that Ted would know everything about her immediately? That’s what the rest of their lives are for, right?

“Here we are!” Iris sings out as she comes in with an assortment of goodies on a silver tray, Ted on her heels with the tea. “We have fresh melon, we have Brie, we have some of that very nice pate—”

As she’s setting down the tray, her gaze catches Diana’s left hand and lingers. Her smile falls, for only a moment, as if someone next to her had broken wind. “—that very nice pate that Richard and Gwendolyn brought on Wednesday, and Ted, is that what I think that is on Diana’s finger?”

Ted stops, his hands tightening around the handles of the tea tray. He narrows his eyes at Diana. Who was supposed to have waited for him. She’ll have to answer to him later, but she feels a stronger need in this moment to address her mother. “It is...we...we...”

She’s cut off by the sound of Ted clearing his throat, mentally shuffling the index cards for the speech she suspects he’d been stewing over all afternoon. “Jack. Iris.” He puts the tray on the table and swallows, his eyes travelling from one worried face to the other, skipping Diana’s. “Let me reassure you. Yeah, maybe I wasn’t lucky enough to have all the advantages you were able to give your daughter. My father, well, he...” Ted’s cheeks redden. “He had his problems. But I think I came out pretty good in spite of it. And I promised myself that when I had my own family, I was going to do whatever it took to give them the things that he couldn’t. Trust me.” He pats his chest. “I’m going to be the model husband. Just you wait and see how good she’s going to have it.”

Silence falls over the living room.

Alex had made promises, too.

Alex had also said, “trust me.”

The confidence melts from Ted’s face. His eyes darken. Diana’s gut fills with dread.

“Daddy?” Her voice comes out thin and girlish. “Aren’t you...aren’t you going to say anything?”

The look over the top of the magazine suggests that he’s already said everything he intends to. But he opens his mouth, regardless. “Congratulations. May you be as happy as I’ve been with your mother.”

“Oh, Jack, really, you can be such a pill. Your only daughter is getting married and you...you’ll have to forgive my husband,” Iris says to Ted. She forces a smile. “I, for one, think this calls for champagne.”

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After dessert, Jack falls asleep in his chair. Ted leaves to get the car. Diana fishes her coat from the closet. She can feel her mother watching every movement of that damned ring.

“At least it’s...different,” Iris sighs.

“Which means you hate it.”

“I don’t hate it, dear. It’s just...well.” She lowers her voice. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Ted, but does he know that it’s a man’s ring? Like the kind you see on those shady characters in the casinos. Where did he get the idea to give that as an engagement ring? Black onyx? Diamond horseshoes? Really. It’s simply too much! If you are such a person who holds stock in signs, which I most certainly am not, then you might be thinking that you could start a marriage on a better foot than by wearing...a gambler’s ring. It’s almost like he won it in some poker game!”

“Ted said the horseshoes are supposed to be for good luck,” she says, pouting. But the words sound false to her ears. And her mother is giving her that expression, the one that means, “and you’re going to need it.” Diana stares at her left hand. Maybe her mother is right. Maybe she’s wearing someone else’s ring. Maybe Ted got a deal from one of his customers. It would explain why he hadn’t held out a box, the little velvet box she’d seen in the movies when men kneel on one knee to propose. He’d merely produced the ring, and slipped it...no, forced it...onto her finger.

“I just don’t understand why you’re rushing into this.”

Diana stiffens. First Daddy and now her. But one mistake does not entitle them to monitor every decision she makes for the rest of her life. “Because I’m ready.”

“And what did he mean about his father? Having his...problems?”

“I hardly see how that matters now. Ted’s a self-made man. He’s worked really hard to distance himself from his father, he hasn’t seen Ted Senior in years, not since he was paroled the last time—”

“Paroled?” Iris’s fingers drift to her mouth, her brows to her hairline. “He was in jail...?”

Diana looks at her shoes. Ted would be furious. She wasn’t supposed to have said anything, not yet. “It wasn’t...as bad as...well, his father sort of embezzled some money from where he worked. And the second time...selling stolen goods...but someone set him up...”

Iris does not look mollified. “At least that would explain the ring.”

Ted’s car purrs up to the house and waits. Her last chance. A man who wants her too badly to wait another day.

Diana yanks on her gloves. “Ted’s a good person and I’m getting married. And I love the ring. It’s unique. He thinks it’s one-of-a-kind. Like me.”

As she storms out into the cold, she crushes her fingers into fists in her pockets, savoring the pain of the too-tight band. She doesn’t care where Ted got it. Doesn’t care if it’s the ugliest ring she’s ever seen. She’s going to wear it forever.

And first thing in the morning, she’s taking it to a jeweler to have it resized. If she can only manage to get the darned thing off her finger.