The diamond is big like a tooth, and glows like there’s a light inside of it. Round, but not quite perfect, with a tiny black dot in the center where the bottom is cut off, where it doesn’t come to a point. It’s a miner’s cut. The words are just there in my brain. I know it’s a miner’s cut and then I realize that I know this ring. I remember twisting it around on her finger while she held me in her lap. I remember this ring and her hair falling, so long over her shoulders, I had to brush it out of my face. Her hair had sun streaks of gold and copper and the ring was platinum. Everything sparkled. I take it off my finger and read the tiny letters of the inscription.
When my father was twenty or so, he played guitar at a coffeehouse in Syracuse if he was between carpentry jobs. He’d play for a free meal and whatever people would put in his tip jar. “You can’t be proud when people will feed you,” he’d say. They both told me the story when they were together. They each had their own part, like it was a play, but he’d never tell any of it after she left, so I don’t remember everything. I wish I did.
The people at the coffeehouse liked him and he always got a good crowd. He didn’t write much, so it was mostly covers, but he played the covers other people didn’t. James Taylor was huge, but he never played Fire and Rain. He’d do the obscure stuff, so people thought he wrote the songs himself because they’d never heard them—Ella, Nat, Fats Waller. Maybe some Dylan B-sides.
He’d been playing all night when my mom walked in with a group of friends. They were talking and laughing and he couldn’t stop watching her from the makeshift stage. She wore a short red dress with tall brown boots and when she smiled it was big and the room got brighter and he felt like the world was a better place.
She would chime in, back when they were happy; she would say that she walked in with a group of friends to get coffee. After that they were supposed to meet some boys somebody knew. They were talking, not paying attention to the music, but then my mother heard my father singing Autumn Leaves. She’d never heard the song before.
“He sang my name,” she’d say, and wink at him. “So, I started watching to figure out if I knew him. I didn’t, but by the end of the song I decided I wanted to.” She would sing the whole song when she told the story—the tale of a left behind lover who remembers his love when the leaves change color and fall from the trees. Her voice was thin, but pretty.
So that’s how they met, because of some stupid song. But he lived in Little River and she lived in Syracuse and her parents expected her to marry a doctor or a lawyer or an astronaut. “What did I want with a husband who was always jumping around on the moon?” she’d say.
He didn’t have a lot of money, so one night when he missed her so much he couldn’t stand it anymore, he drove up to Buffalo to ask his grandfather for his grandmother’s ring. He had it engraved with a line from their song the very next day and drove all the way to Syracuse in the middle of a snowstorm to ask her to marry him, right in front of her father. And when she said yes, but her father said absolutely not, she said that Jesus was a carpenter and that was good enough for her. So they had a little wedding that no one on her side came to and Autumn Leaves was their first dance.
Part of the problem with wedding songs is that people don’t listen to the words enough. With my parents, it was like the song decided it. They never had a fighting chance.
I roll the ring around in my hands. If I turn it the right way, all I can read of the lyrics is When Autumn leaves.
— Chapter 5 —
“We should just go,” I say to Matty. We’re hanging out in his uncle’s deer blind since I’m not allowed at his house anymore and I try to avoid him ever spending time at the motorhome.
“Go where?” he says, blowing into his hands. The blind was a better place to hang in the summer.
“Does it matter?” I jump around to stay warm. “Anywhere. Not here.”
“What’s so bad about here?” He pulls a sloppy hand-rolled cigarette from behind his ear and lights it, coughing. This smoking thing is new. He picked it up from Mark Conrad and now he thinks he’s a badass. I don’t smoke, but his parents will blame me when they find out. They blame me for everything. His mother stopped liking me after mine left. As if me and my dad had a disease her family could catch.
“What’s so great about here?” I say. “We’re dying on the vine, Matty. There’s a whole world out there.”