Mr. Whitley leans over and looks at the ring. He doesn't speak for a second.
His old hand reaches out and turns the box a quarter rotation under the light. Then he smiles—soft, slow, the smile of a man recognizing an old friend.
"I'd know this from anywhere. Margaret's ring."
"Yes, sir."
"Whose finger?"
"A very special woman's, sir. Harlan Lyle's little girl. Dakota."
He looks up at me. Old man's eyes, watery, sharp underneath the watery. He nods slowly. "You waited a while, son."
"Yes, sir."
"What's her size?"
"Six and a half. I measured a ring she leaves on her dresser when she works horses."
"Smart man." He picks the ring out of the cedar box with the careful old hands of a man who has been holding small precious things since before I was born.
He holds it under the lamp on his counter and turns it. "We'll size it down a quarter. Clean the prongs. Polish her up. Have her for you by two."
"Thank you, sir."
"You go get yourself a coffee at Cooper's. Take your friend." He nods toward Banshee. "Come back just after two."
"Yes, sir."
I leave the cedar box on the counter. Banshee follows me out the door. The bell rings again behind us.
We walk down Main Street to Cooper's diner two blocks down. Get coffee. Sit at a table by the window. The Llano River is visible through the glass two blocks down past Cooper's, green and shallow under the May sun.
Banshee, across the table, watches me look at my watch every five minutes. Doesn't comment. Just drinks his coffee and lets me figure my own nerves out.
Around one-thirty he finally speaks up, "She's going to say yes, brother. I don’t know why you’re so fucking nervous."
"I know she is."
"Then drink your coffee and relax. This is a damn good day."
I drink my coffee.
At two-fifteen, Mr. Whitley hands me the ring in a small velvet box. He's polished it to a soft warm gold. The Texas turquoise looks like a piece of pale sky in the afternoon light coming through his front window.
He sets the box in my palm and folds my fingers over it with both his old hands. "Tell Margaret I said hello, son."
I go still. "Mr. Whitley. She died eight years ago."
He's quiet a long second. His face changes—the way an old man's face changes when he hears something he should have known and didn't. He looks down at our hands together over the velvet box.
"Oh." His voice has gone smaller. "I'm sorry, Spur. I hadn't heard. Your grandmother was a great friend to me. We lost touch some years back."
"She thought a lot of you, sir."
"Did she now?"
"She did. She told me about my grandfather buying that ring from you in 1967 maybe a hundred times in my life."
