It was Wes's grandmother's ring. He had not seen it since he was a boy. It was a thin band of rose gold, worn smooth, with a small, old-fashioned diamond set high in the middle and a tiny garnet on either side, like two drops of cranberry. It had been his grandmother's, and then it had sat in his mother's jewelry box for twenty years, waiting, his mother had once told him, for the right girl.
"Frank's mother gave me this when I married her son," Barbara said. "She told me to pass it on when the time came. I've been keeping it for a long time." She pushed it an inch closer to Delia. "I'd like you to have it. For spring."
Wes stopped breathing.
Delia looked at the ring. All the laughter had gone out of her face. For a long moment she did not move at all, and in the bright kitchen with the bacon popping and the macramé owl staring down from the wall, Wes watched something happen in her eyes, under the brown smoke of the liner, that he did not understand and could not bear to look at.
"Barbara," she said quietly. "I can't."
"You can," said his mother. "Humor an old woman." And she took Delia's hand in both of hers, and turned it over, and set the green velvet box in her palm, and closed her fingers around it.
Then she stood up, briskly, and smoothed her cardigan, and said, "Wesley, your car is under four feet of snow and Hal's snowblower won't go out in the street. There's a shovel in the garage. Delia, I'm going to call my sister in Stamford and find out if her roof has fallen in yet," and she took the harvest-gold receiver off the wall and carried it, cord stretching behind her, around the corner into the pantry, and shut the pantry door on it.
Wes and Delia sat across from each other at the little table. Between them the cinnamon toast went cold. Delia's hand stayed closed around the box.
"We have to tell her," Wes said.