My MIL Called My Engagement Ring ‘Dime-Store Glass’ For 35 Years. Then It Showed Up On Her Favorite Granddaughter’s Finger

My mother-in-law stood up at the rehearsal dinner with her water glass in one hand and her granddaughter’s left hand in the other, and she held that hand up under the lights of the Elks lodge like she was showing off a prize heifer at the county fair.

“This,” Evelyn said, “is the Dunham diamond.”

Forty people clapped. The bride, Brielle, laughed and blushed and tried to pull her hand back, and Evelyn wouldn’t let go of it.

“It belonged to my husband’s mother, Adeline, God rest her,” she said. “It has been in my keeping for a very long time, and I decided it should go to someone who will appreciate a real stone.” She looked down the long table, past the ham and the scalloped potatoes and the sheet cake with the little plastic bells on it, and her eyes landed on me. “Some of us know the difference between real and glass.”

A few people laughed. My sister-in-law Beverly laughed the loudest, the way she has at every one of Evelyn’s jokes since 1993.

I didn’t laugh. I was looking at the ring.

Platinum, gone a little soft at the edges. A round stone set high in six claws, with tiny engraved leaves running down the shoulders. I knew that ring the way you know your own handwriting. I had worn it every day for thirty-four years, until the week after Easter.

My husband, Abe, put his hand on my knee under the table. He could feel me shaking.

“Not yet,” he whispered.

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Thursdays With Adeline

I met Abe Dunham in 1989, when I was twenty-six and running a register in the cafeteria at Burris Laboratory School in Muncie, Indiana. He came in to fix the walk-in cooler. He was the slowest-talking man I had ever met, and he fixed that cooler in forty minutes, and he asked me to the Dairy Queen on the same afternoon.

By the time we’d been dating a few months, I was driving his grandmother to the beauty shop every Thursday.

Adeline Dunham was eighty-four then. She lived alone in a second-floor apartment over a shoe repair on Walnut Street, and she had stopped driving after she backed her Buick into a mailbox and kept going. Abe worked days. His mother, Evelyn, lived ten minutes away and never seemed to have the time.

So I took her. Thursdays at two. A wash and set at Fern’s on Jackson Street, and then a grilled cheese and a vanilla Coke at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s while her curls cooled.

She talked the whole time. About the Depression and about her husband, Amos, who sold insurance door to door and once sold a policy to a man who turned out to be wanted in three states. About her son, Abe’s father, who died in 1979 when Abe was nineteen. She almost never talked about Evelyn. When she did, she pressed her lips together first.

“My son’s wife,” she said once, stirring her Coke with the straw, “has been waiting on my jewelry box since 1958.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I was twenty-six. I said something about how I was sure Evelyn didn’t mean it like that.

Adeline patted my hand. “Honey,” she said. “You’re sweet. Don’t ever let anybody make you stop being sweet. But don’t be stupid either.”

A Sucrets Tin and a Folded Note

Abe proposed in March of 1991, on the front porch of my parents’ house in Yorktown, while my father pretended to read the paper in the window.

He didn’t get down on one knee because of his bad knee from high school football. He just held out a little yellow Sucrets lozenge tin, the kind that slides open, and said, “Grandma wants you to have this. And so do I.”

Inside, on a nest of cotton balls, was the ring. And under the ring was a square of blue stationery folded down small.

I unfolded it later that night, sitting on my bed in my old room. Adeline’s handwriting was spidery and slanted.

For Abe’s girl, the one who brings me to Fern’s. This was mine for 66 years. It was never anybody’s to wait for. Wear it every day. A.D.

“She told me not to tell Mom,” Abe said when I asked him about it. “She said Mom would raise Cain.”

“Is it real?” I asked him. “The stone.”

He shrugged. Abe has never cared about things like that. “Grandpa Amos sold insurance. I don’t think it’s the Hope Diamond, Cory.”

I didn’t care either. I put the note back in the Sucrets tin and the tin in my dresser drawer, and I wore the ring.

“Well. It Sparkles.”

The engagement dinner was at Evelyn’s house on Riverside Avenue, a brick ranch with plastic runners on the hallway carpet and a ceramic Siamese cat on top of the television.

She looked at the ring over the pot roast. She took my hand and turned it toward the light over the table, and she held it there a long time without saying anything.

Then she let go.

“Well,” she said. “It sparkles. I’ll give it that.” She passed the green beans to Abe’s brother, Calvin. “Dime-store glass always does.”

Calvin laughed, because Calvin laughed whenever his mother wanted him to. Abe went red to the ears and said, “Mom.”

“What? I’m complimenting it. It’s very convincing.” She smiled at me. “You’ll want to take it off when you do dishes, dear. Those cheap settings bend.”

I took it off when I did dishes for the next thirty-five years. I’ll give her that.

The joke never went away. It just got older, like the rest of us. When Calvin married Beverly in 1993, Beverly showed up with a one-and-a-half carat solitaire from the jewelry counter at L.S. Ayres, and Evelyn held it up next to my hand at Christmas so everybody could see the difference.

“Now that,” she said, “is a diamond.”

At my son Emmett’s high school graduation party, she told a neighbor I’d gotten my ring “out of a gumball machine at the Ponderosa.” At Thanksgiving in 2002, when I dropped a gravy boat, she said, “Careful, Corinne, you’ll crack your rock.”

Every family has its jokes. That was the one they told about me.

What Frank Abernathy Saw Under the Lamp

In the fall of 2009, one of the claws snagged on my sweater and bent. I took the ring to Abernathy Jewelers downtown, an old store with a wooden floor that creaked and a clock repairman in the back.

Frank Abernathy was about seventy then. He fixed the claw while I waited, and then he said, “Mind if I give it a proper cleaning?”

He steamed it and set it under a lamp and put his loupe in his eye. And then he didn’t say anything for so long that I thought something was wrong with it.

“Mrs. Dunham,” he said finally, “where did you get this?”

“It was my husband’s grandmother’s.”

“Did she ever tell you what it was?”

“My mother-in-law says it’s glass.”

Frank took the loupe out of his eye and looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Your mother-in-law,” he said, “is a liar or a fool, and I don’t know her well enough to say which.”

It was an Old European cut diamond, he told me. Hand-cut, probably in the 1910s, set in a platinum mounting from the twenties. He weighed it at two point one carats. He showed me the tiny engraving inside the band, worn almost smooth: A.D. 1924. Adeline had married Amos Dunham in June of 1924.

Then he put the loupe in my eye and moved the lamp.

“See that? About nine o’clock, near the edge. Little white mark, shaped like a comma.”

I saw it. A tiny curled flaw, deep in the stone, like somebody had made a pen mark inside the light.

“That’s a feather,” he said. “Natural inclusion. Every diamond’s got its own fingerprints. That one’s yours.”

He wrote me an appraisal that afternoon. Twenty-two thousand dollars, in 2009 money. He drew the comma on a little printed diagram of the stone and photographed the engraving and the ring from four sides.

I drove straight home and sat in the driveway with the engine running.

“Twenty-two thousand?” Abe said at the kitchen table that night. He picked up the appraisal and put it down and picked it up again. “Grandma walked to the beauty shop in rubber boots.”

“She knew,” I said. “And your mother knew. Your mother’s known since 1958.”

We had it insured the next week through a woman named Delia Fairbanks, who came to the house and photographed it all over again and made me sign three forms. Every few years after that she updated it. By this past spring it was insured for forty-six thousand dollars.

And I never said one word about it to Evelyn.

People have asked me why. My own son asked me why, when he found out. The truth is, after the first few years, the joke stopped being about the ring. It was about whether I was good enough for her son, and no appraisal was ever going to settle that. If I had walked into Christmas dinner waving Frank Abernathy’s paperwork, she would have found something else. My cooking. My people. My job at the cafeteria.

So I let her laugh. I knew what was on my hand. Adeline knew. That was enough for me.

A Saucer on the Windowsill

Easter was at Evelyn’s, the way it had been every year since Abe’s father died.

She was eighty-eight now. She still lived alone in the brick ranch, still drove her Buick to the Kroger on Tuesdays, and still made the whole family come to her for every holiday, even though Beverly and I cooked most of it and carried it in.

After dinner I washed the roasting pan, the way I always did. I took off my rings, the way I always did, and set them in the little china saucer with the violets on it that sat on her windowsill above the sink. Thirty-five years I had put my rings in that saucer. Everybody in that family had seen me do it a hundred times.

I scrubbed the pan, and dried it, and put the rings back on, and went home.

It was almost three weeks before I noticed anything.

My knuckles have gotten bad. Arthritis runs on my mother’s side. The ring had started to turn on my finger, and I’d been meaning to take it to have the band sized down. One night I was doing the crossword under my magnifying lamp, the big one with the light around the edge, and I took the ring off to rub my knuckle and it felt wrong in my palm.

Light. It felt light.

I held it under the magnifier and turned it. The leaves on the shoulders were there. The six claws were there.

Inside the band, where it should have said A.D. 1924, there was nothing. Just smooth bright metal.

I didn’t sleep that night. In the morning I drove downtown with my coat buttoned wrong.

Frank had retired, but his grandson ran the store now, and Frank still came in on Wednesdays to sit in the back and complain about the coffee. It was a Wednesday. I’ll never forget how slowly he got up out of his chair.

He put the loupe in his eye. He tested it on a little probe with a needle that beeped. He weighed it.

“Corinne,” he said, very gently. “This is sterling silver with a rhodium plate. And a cubic zirconia.” He set it down on the black velvet. “It’s good work. Somebody had it made from pictures, and they did a nice job on the leaves. That’s maybe forty dollars of stone.”

“Forty dollars,” I said.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

I knew. I had known since the night under the magnifying lamp. There was only one person in my life who had studied that ring as closely as I had, and who had wanted it longer.

“Let Me Call the Police, Cory”

Abe sat at the kitchen table with the fake ring in front of him for most of an hour. He kept picking it up and setting it down.

“She’s eighty-eight years old,” he finally said. His voice cracked on it.

“I know how old she is.”

“Maybe it was somebody else. Maybe Beverly…”

“Abe.”

He put his face in his hands. He is sixty-six years old and he has never in his life said a hard word to his mother. When his father died, Abe was nineteen, and he quit his first year at Ball State and went to work so she could keep the house on Riverside. Calvin was fifteen. Abe paid the mortgage on that house for six years. Evelyn has never once mentioned it.

“Let me call the police, Cory,” he said through his hands. “Let me at least do that.”

I thought about it. I had Delia’s insurance paperwork. I had Frank’s photographs and his little drawing of the comma. I had the fake. I could have had a deputy on Evelyn’s porch by suppertime.

And then the next day she would have told everybody in Delaware County that her daughter-in-law had her arrested over a piece of glass.

“No,” I said. “Not yet. Let’s see what she does with it.”

I didn’t have to wait long.

Two weeks later Beverly called, breathless. “Did you hear? Mom’s giving Brielle the family diamond for the wedding. Adeline’s ring. She’s had it all these years, isn’t that something? She’s going to present it at the rehearsal dinner.”

“Isn’t that something,” I said.

“I didn’t even know there was a family diamond.”

“Neither did your mother-in-law,” I said, “until about six weeks ago.”

Beverly didn’t get it. I didn’t expect her to.

The Rehearsal Dinner at the Elks Lodge

So there I was in June, at the long table in the Elks lodge, with forty people clapping and my ring on Brielle’s finger under the fluorescent lights.

I want to say something about Brielle. She is a good girl. She’s twenty-six, a dental assistant, and she was marrying a quiet young man named Ethan Ford who teaches seventh-grade science. She sends me a birthday card every year with a real letter in it. None of this was her fault, and I had decided long before that night that whatever happened, I wasn’t going to ruin her wedding.

I was only going to ruin Evelyn’s toast.

When the clapping stopped, Evelyn was still standing. She was enjoying herself. She had her blue church dress on and her good pearls, and she raised her water glass toward my end of the table.

“Corinne,” she said, “you’ll be happy for her. You of all people know the difference between real and glass.”

The room laughed again. Ethan’s parents laughed politely, not knowing what the joke was.

I folded my napkin and stood up.

“I’d love a closer look,” I said. “If Brielle doesn’t mind.”

Brielle held her hand out across the table, smiling. “Aunt Cory, isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen,” I said.

I took my reading glasses out of my purse, and then I took out the loupe Frank Abernathy had given me in 2009, which I had carried in my purse ever since, and I took out a manila folder.

Evelyn’s water glass stopped halfway to the table.

“Brielle, honey,” I said, “would you hold your hand still for me under the light?” She did. I put the loupe to my eye and tilted her hand, and there it was, at nine o’clock near the edge. A tiny white comma.

I held the loupe out to Brielle. “Look at about nine o’clock. Near the edge.”

She looked. She is a dental assistant and she is used to looking at very small things under bright lights. “There’s a little white mark,” she said. “Like a comma.”

I opened the folder on the table between the ham and the sheet cake.

The first page was Frank’s appraisal from 2009, with his little printed diagram of the stone and the comma drawn in by hand at nine o’clock. The second page was Delia Fairbanks’s insurance schedule, updated this past March: one platinum Old European cut diamond ring, 2.1 carats, insured to Corinne Dunham, forty-six thousand dollars. The third page was a photograph of the inside of the band.

“There should be letters inside, sweetheart,” I said. “Very worn. A.D. 1924.”

Brielle twisted the ring off and tipped it toward the light. The room had gone so quiet I could hear the walk-in cooler humming back in the lodge kitchen.

“A.D. 1924,” she read.

And then I set the forty-dollar copy down on the tablecloth next to the folder.

“That Woman Took My Ring”

Nobody said anything for a long time. Calvin stared at his plate. Beverly had her hand over her mouth.

Then Evelyn put her water glass down, very carefully, the way you put down something you’re afraid you’ll throw.

“That ring,” she said, “was promised to me.”

“By who, Mom?” Abe said. It was the first thing he’d said all night.

“By your father! In 1958! He told me his mother’s ring would come to me.” Her voice was getting higher and thinner. “I was that woman’s daughter-in-law for twenty years. I had her every Sunday. Every Christmas. And she gave it away to a cafeteria girl she’d known for six months.” She pointed at me with one crooked finger. “That woman took my ring when she married my son, and I have looked at it on her hand every holiday for thirty-five years.”

“So you called it glass,” I said.

“It might as well have been, on you.”

Ethan’s mother made a small sound and looked at her husband.

I reached into my purse one last time and took out the Sucrets tin. It’s rusty at the hinge now. I slid it open and took out the square of blue stationery and unfolded it, and I handed it to Brielle, because I didn’t trust my voice.

Brielle read it out loud.

“For Abe’s girl, the one who brings me to Fern’s. This was mine for 66 years. It was never anybody’s to wait for. Wear it every day. A.D.”

Evelyn sat down.

Abe stood up then. He is not a big talker, my husband. He looked at his mother across that table for a long moment, and I watched thirty-five years go across his face.

“I paid your mortgage for six years, Mom,” he said quietly. “You never once said thank you. And I never asked you to.” He swallowed. “But you went in my wife’s saucer.”

That was all he said. He sat back down and took my hand.

Brielle was crying. She held the real ring in her palm for a second, looking at it, and then she walked around the end of the table, past her grandmother’s chair, and she took my left hand and slid it onto my finger. It was loose. My knuckles, I told you.

“I’m so sorry, Aunt Cory,” she whispered.

“You don’t have one thing to be sorry for,” I said.

Evelyn left before the cake. Calvin drove her home. Beverly came and sat in Evelyn’s empty chair next to me and didn’t say anything for a while, and then she said, “I laughed at that joke for thirty years.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m going to stop.”

Something Borrowed

The next morning, before the wedding, I drove to the church and found Brielle in the basement bride’s room in her slip and her robe, with her hair half done and her eyes still a little puffy.

I took the ring off and held it out to her.

“Something borrowed,” I said. “You give it back to me Monday.”

She looked at it, and at me. “Aunt Cory, I can’t.”

“Adeline didn’t wear it in a drawer,” I said. “Neither do I. You wear it today, and you think about a woman who walked to the beauty shop in rubber boots and still knew exactly who she was.” I closed her fingers around it. “And then Monday, you bring it to my house, and I’ll make you a grilled cheese.”

She wore it on her right hand under her wedding band. I watched her walk down the aisle on Calvin’s arm and I watched the light catch it when she took Ethan’s hands.

Evelyn sat in the second pew in her blue church dress and didn’t look at me once.

On Monday, Brielle and Ethan came by on their way to the airport. She handed me the ring in a little velvet box she’d bought for it, and inside the lid she’d taped a square of paper. It said, in her round dental-office handwriting: Returned with love. B.

I had the band sized down that Wednesday. Frank did it himself, in the back, complaining about the coffee the whole time.

A Box on My Porch in October

I thought that was the end of it with Evelyn. We didn’t speak all summer. Abe went by to mow her grass and check her furnace filters, because that’s who he is, and she let him in and talked about the weather.

Then in October, on a gray Saturday morning, her Buick pulled up in front of our house.

She came up the porch steps slow, holding the rail with both hands. She had a small black box in her purse. Old, with a cracked hinge and faded gold letters on the lid from a jewelry store in Indianapolis that closed before I was born.

“It was hers,” Evelyn said. “The original box. It was in her apartment when we cleaned it out. I kept it.” She held it out to me and didn’t let go right away when I took it. “I thought I’d put the ring back in it someday.”

We stood on the porch. Neither of us asked the other one inside.

“She told me once,” Evelyn said, looking at my mums instead of at me. “In 1962. I asked her straight out when I’d get the ring, and she said, ‘When you’re kind, Evie.'” Her mouth worked for a second. “I was thirty-one. I thought she was being hateful.”

I didn’t say anything. I’d learned that from Abe.

“You drove her to the beauty shop,” Evelyn said. “I never did. It was ten minutes.”

Then she went back down the steps, holding the rail, and drove away.

I don’t know what that was. It wasn’t an apology, exactly. Evelyn doesn’t have those in her. But at Thanksgiving this year she handed me the roasting pan without a word, and when I reached for the china saucer on the windowsill, out of thirty-five years of habit, she said, “Leave it on, Corinne. You’ve got a good grip.”

I left it on.

The ring sits in Adeline’s old box on my dresser at night now, next to the Sucrets tin with the blue note inside. During the day it’s on my hand, where she meant it to be. Some days I catch it in the light over the kitchen sink and I find that comma at nine o’clock without even trying.

Forty-six thousand dollars, the insurance paper says. It was never about that. It was about one old woman on Walnut Street deciding who deserved to be called family, and making sure it stuck.

If somebody in your family has been calling your treasure glass for years, pass this along to them. Or just share it with somebody who’ll know exactly what I mean.

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