The Other Americans(35)

Then the cabin phone rang, startling me. It was an old-fashioned landline phone and its sound was urgent and bothersome. I dragged myself out of bed to pick it up, holding the receiver close with one hand, and working with the other to untangle the cord. The line crackled. “Can I speak to Mr. Guerrari?” a man asked. His voice was high-pitched, almost feminine in tone, and he spoke with a European accent I couldn’t place.

“Guerraoui,” I corrected, my heart skipping a beat.

“Sorry, it’s hard to make out the handwriting on this order. I only have the carbon copy in front of me. Is Mr. Guerraoui home?”

“No, he’s not here. He passed away.”

There was a moment of shocked silence on the other end of the line. In that time, I relived my disbelief at the news of my father’s death, the sight of him in his burial shroud, how cold his skin had been when I’d touched it, the grief and anger that took turns inside my heart.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” the man said. “I didn’t know. I called the cell phone number he left me, but it went to voicemail, and no one ever answered this one until today.”

“He didn’t give you the house number?”

“No. Just this one.” After a moment, the man drew his breath again. “Who should I talk to about getting paid for the balance?”

“What balance? I’m sorry, who did you say you were?”

“The balance on the engagement ring he ordered in April. This is Maurice from Maurice and Dana’s Designs.”

I had trouble parsing the phrase engagement ring. It didn’t seem to belong to a language I could speak or understand, and that feeling persisted even after I wrote down the address for the jewelry shop, drove to Palm Springs to find it, and was buzzed inside by Maurice. I was clinging to the possibility that there was some kind of misunderstanding, that my father had meant “anniversary ring,” even though my mother had developed an allergy to detergent some years ago and couldn’t wear rings of any kind. “I’m here about the ring,” I said, nearly out of breath as I walked into the shop.

Maurice nodded thoughtfully and his eyes misted over, as if he were about to grieve with me. He was very short—his waist barely reached the top of the glass counter that separated us—and he wore gold rings on the last two fingers of each hand. From a file folder by the cash register he retrieved the receipt and showed it to me. The words engagement ring jumped out from the first line. “And he ordered this ring from you himself?”

“Yes,” Maurice said. “He was very clear about what he wanted. Something elegant and timeless. He didn’t like anything we had here, so we had to custom-order it. That’s why it took so long.”

I tried to picture my father standing right where I was, looking at all the rings on display in this shop. Nothing here had been good enough for his lover, his love, his soon-to-be-fiancée. No, this couldn’t be true. It seemed to me as if Maurice were talking about some other man, a stranger. Because how could my father have done something like this? Did my mother know he was getting ready to leave her? Nothing about the last few days suggested that she knew about an affair. “Who’s the ring for?” I asked. “Do you know the woman’s name?”

“No, I’m sorry. He came in alone. I’ve never had a situation like this come up before.” Maurice watched me for a moment, and then he cleared his throat. “So. About the balance. Your father put down half, and half was due on delivery.” He placed the jewelry box in front of me. A diamond solitaire. Princess cut. The inside of the ring bore three words, three precious words, etched in cursive. “The total comes to $3,250.”

“I can’t pay for this. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

“But I can’t sell this ring to anyone else, not when it’s already inscribed. What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.” I pushed the jewelry box across the glass counter and walked out of the shop. Standing in the parking lot for a moment, I wondered if the phone call my father made to me on the day he died might have been about this. Was he going to prepare me for what he was about to do? From behind came the sound of hurried footsteps.

“Miss,” Maurice called out. “Wait.”

But I got into my car and left. As I drove back to Yucca Valley, I thought again about the Cold War between my parents, the long silences that followed, silences I had mistaken for peace. Instead, the rift between them had deepened. Now I remembered that, the previous October, Salma had invited my parents for a weekend in Lake Tahoe, but at the last minute my father had begged off, saying he had too much work to do. And on Thanksgiving, he’d disappeared for a couple of hours and no one had been able to reach him. But if those were signs of an affair, I hadn’t noticed them.

Who was the woman? How long had he been seeing her? Did he bring her to the cabin? Did he sleep with her in that big bed, the bed where I had been sleeping not two hours before? All the certainties I’d once had about him vanished. I was overwhelmed by feelings I couldn’t quite put into words yet. In my haze, the only thing I could feel clearly was the weight of his secret; it was mine to carry now. I couldn’t tell my mother about it, because it would only compound her grief, and I couldn’t trust my sister with it, because she told my mother everything.