The Ring ChapterOne

A novella about two very different adult sisters and one ring which had belonged to their late mother. A chapter will be published here every day.

 The Ring

HEATHER LOUD POWERS

WHEN HEATHER LOUD POWERS stepped into her late mother’s bedroom, sadness swept over her. Although it was perfectly neat, the way her mother left it each morning, it looked disused. For the last two months it had been.

        There were the six weeks Medora Loud had been in the hospital, conscious some days, out of it others. Heather and her sister Margo Loud Steiner had signed the Do Not Resuscitate Order which their mother had told them to do many times over the years, always adding, “But wait until I’m close to dying. Not now.”

Heather threw the window open, letting in the chill October air and the smell of fallen leaves. After a few minutes, she lowered it to a crack.

Covering the bed was the quilt her mother had cross-stitched, before turning it over to a professional quilter for the backing.

Heather remembered how as a teenager she had watched her mother create the red and pink rose design on rainy or snowy Sundays as they watched episodes of Murder She Wrote on cable TV.

Her father would be working in his office, the third bedroom, which meant that she and her sister Margo had to share the second bedroom. To keep them from killing each other over everything, Medora had turned the part of the basement with a large window facing the backyard flower garden into a studio where Margo spent most of her time. Medora removed enough of Margo’s mess to keep Heather almost happy.

Checking her watch, Heather realized she had better start work if she and Margo were going to decide what the estate sales office would sell and its price range.

Jonathan Wilson had explained what they needed to do to make the sale of her mother’s things a success. Too bad that neither Margo’s daughter Bethany nor her Grace wanted the items that had meant so much to her mother, Heather thought. Although she wanted some of them, her husband Grayson did not want to add to the “clutter” of their home.

Her mother had been a confirmed WASP, a New England Yankee with a relative going back to the Revolutionary War. Her mother’s Daughters of the American Revolution’s membership was a badge. She ranked her friends in two groups, DAR. members and others.

Heather liked most of the DAR members. Margo called them B2, Bigoted Bitches.

There was one thing she wanted from her mother’s things, not even the quilt, which was so New England Yankeeish as the rest of the house.

A ring.

That she really, really wanted even though her mother seldom wore it. She couldn’t explain why she wanted it so badly, but she did. Picturing it on Margo’s clay-covered, paint-covered hand instead of hers annoyed her.

A gold leaf had tiny diamonds in its center rib. Not that her mother wore it often, but Heather had seen Medora Young Loud showing it to her boyfriend once, if you could call a man in his sixties a boyfriend.

At first Heather thought that it was an engagement ring despite Medora making it clear she had no intention of marrying after Heather’s father died seven years before. Medora said that she enjoyed going out to dinner or a show with him.

Henry Willis was a widower. Medora told her daughters that he was a neighbor, a good friend and if they didn’t like it, they knew what they could do and where they could go.

Their family had been friends with Henry and his late wife. The couple had been a bit like a good aunt and uncle to the girls as they were growing up. Mostly with Henry keeping Medora busy, it took a lot of mother-watching responsibility from them.

So much for thinking. She was on a mission, to find a ring, one shaped like a gold leaf with a diamond spine. That should be hers. It wasn’t mentioned in the will.

Unlike Margo’s clay-covered hand, Heather’s own part-time job as an assistant librarian at the town library would make the ring safe from art materials. She opened her mother’s jewelry box.

Inside were some antique pins that she should have evaluated before the sale: likewise, her grandfather’s pocket watch. Probably belonged to her great-great grandfather. Might as well put that in the sale. Today everything was digital with time being told on phones.

There was her mother’s pearl necklace. Medora had given both daughters anniversary pearl necklaces, starting with five tiny pearls when they were born and five added for each birthday. Heather wore hers regularly. What did Margo do with hers? Her sister didn’t even like jewelry.

Heather looked at the time. She needed to pick up Margo so the two of them could go through Medora’s house together. Heather didn’t mind doing some of the work, but enough was enough. 

MARGO LOUD STEINER

“SHIT! HER OLDER sister’s car pulled up in front of the house. From where she sat at her worktable, she could see through the window next to the front door to her sister’s car, followed by her sister striding to the house.

Heather did not bother to knock, just opened the door. “Margo? Margo? Anyone home? We need to go to Mother’s.”

Margo dropped her brush into the turpentine. Her mother’s final illness and funeral had delayed her completion of the commission, which would earn her enough for six months expenses and some savings.

It was a tea set for some rich bitch in New York: four cups and saucers, sugar bowl, pitcher, and tea pot. Each one had a short quote from a Shakespeare play along with a painting. One cup had Juliette on a balcony. Romeo was on the sugar and creamer looking up. Naturally, the saying was “Romeo, Romeo blah, blah, blah on Juliette’s.”

Over the years Margo had developed a reputation for producing individual ceramic work. Her success hadn’t changed her lifestyle.

The money from her share of the divorce from Hans-Peter Steiner had paid for this tiny house in the woods not far from a pond. An extension served as her studio, although she often chose to do some of the work on the kitchen table, especially like this cold October day, when she could light the wood-burning stove and put on music.

“Hello Heather.” Margo let her sister bustle in. Even if Heather was only four years older, she bustled like an old lady.

“Where’s Bethany?”

“She’s taken Hans-Peter to the airport. His flight to Stuttgart is tonight.”

“I don’t know why he bothered to come to mother’s memorial service.”

“For Bethany.” She didn’t say “and for me.” She added, “He and mother always got along.” He and Bethany had arrived late for late for the funeral service where it had only been the sisters, Grayson Powers, Henry Willis and the new minister. She’d forgotten his name. Her ex and daughter had stayed for the memorial service for Medora’s friends and neighbors four days later.

Nor did she need to say, although she wanted to, you got along better than mother and I did. Heather knew that.

Heather was the favored daughter. Margo was the outlaw of the family, the one who moved to Germany to intern with a ceramics company. Worse, she had left New England and worse still, America. As they say, the rest is history.

Despite the divorce, she and Hans-Peter had more or less stayed friends in raising their daughter. As for Bethany, she shuffled back and forth between Stuttgart and Massachusetts, somewhat uncomfortable in either culture, although she seemed almost to have grown out of the blaming her parents because she felt she didn’t belong anywhere. As a post doc student, she was on temporary leave from the University of Tübingen for her grandmother’s funeral and memorial services, although she done work on her laptop almost every day she had been at Margo’s.

Margo’s production of Bethany was the one thing Margo’s mother had approved of her daughter doing.

As if she could conjure up her daughter by thinking about her, Margo heard a second car, her car. The car door slammed and Bethany entered.

Her daughter was not beautiful and did little to enhance her good features. Clothes were never important to her. What was “in” never impressed her. She did what she wanted, which was something scientific that Margo never had and never would understand, although sharing the knowledge didn’t seem important to either of them. There were other things about where they could chat.

Mother and daughter may have had little in common when it came to the actual work that they did, but they were kindred spirits about what they felt for their different work.

Margo was passionate about her design work, even when clients sometimes annoyed her. Her exhibitions in New York, Paris and Berlin had given her a reputation where people sought to commission her ceramics.

Bethany’s work wasn’t work to her. It was food, air, water. She would forget to leave at the end of a day when something was right, and when something went wrong she would stay and stay until at least she was on track to a solution.

Margo has been surprised that Bethany had taken the time to come to Medora’s funeral and stay for the memorial, but as her daughter said, “There was a break in the project while more data was collected. That data made no sense to Margo even when Bethany explained or tried to. Instead, they made popcorn and binge-watched Midsomer Murders and other British mystery series as they had when Bethany was a teenager.

“Auntie Heather. What are you doing here?” Bethany asked.

“I’m picking up your mom to go to grandmother’s to get ready for the estate sale. I did call ahead, Margo, but you didn’t answer.”

“I don’t answer when I’m working,” Margo explained for the zillionth time.

Had Margo a chance to do it over, she would have bought different land and built her tiny home a greater distance from her mother and sister even if both women had come in handy when Bethany was younger.

“You should come too, Bethany. There might be things you want.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to take anything back to Germany with me. My flat makes Mutti’s house look palatial.”

Heather’s eye rolls showed how she felt about what she called Margo’s cabin. Her four-bedroom house wasn’t a McMansion exactly, but it would have qualified for a House and Garden spread as a successful reclamation of a Victorian house.

She and Grayson, her husband, were far from rich, but frugal New England DNA ran in both their veins. He was the chief financial officer at the educational publishing house in town. Heather worked part time at the local library once her daughter Grace started school.

Grace and Bethany were a year apart to the day, making joint birthday parties easy during years when Bethany was living in the States. In their early relationship, heir early relationship was hampered when Grace couldn’t understand Bethany’s German accent. Even when they shared a tongue, Bethany’s interest in math and science did not hold any interest in Grace’s love of the latest whatevers. As they grew older, they became closer, often expressing their confusion about their mothers’ disagreements.

The only thing the four women shared was a love of reading with all four loving mysteries.