Ring

      Gene never thought he would see his engagement ring again. Nested diamond, traces of blue, with smaller gems embedded in divots along the helix band. It was just as beautiful as it had been back in July - the last time he’d seen it - before he’d had to move out. Tegan said it must have gotten dropped somewhere. But there it was, he saw the picture, it was on her hand - which was now intertwined with her lover’s.

           They had been so perfect together, so broken together, but so perfect.

           Tegan was always going on and on about her alien fingers - fingers he adored, fingers he craved, fingers he now wanted to smash with a hammer - bent fingers that were a product of her early onset arthritis, itself a product of some autoimmune disease. Once, in bed, she’d told Gene her worst fear: that her tendons would contract and need to be cut, leaving her a useless cripple. He promised to take care of her if that happened. Now he would happily do the cutting.

           For his own part, Gene had faced a rough couple of years. First, he’d battled appendicitis - nearly lost - but bounced back after three weeks of broth and a desperate surgery. That was around Thanksgiving. His family, who he was living with, had gone to Florida to visit an uncle; they knew Gene was sick, but they left him anyway. The night his appendix popped, Gene woke up and couldn’t stop shivering. Nobody’s fool, he grabbed his cellphone, crawled to the bathroom, and lay with his head under the toilet for the next 3 hours, unsure if he was going to vomit or die or neither or both. 

           That was before Tegan was his girl. Back then, his girl was Angie, and Angie had a husband, and it was good because they all knew about each other and talked to each other and were friendly with each other. It was Angie’s husband who came over and called the ambulance when he called Angie to come, please, help. She had to work and couldn’t come, she said, but when he got to the ER, she was already there waiting.

           Angie and her husband were gone now. She’d just got too busy for Gene. She pushed him out to see other men and do other things and it was a real mess, but he was forever grateful to them for saving his life.

           Tegan had saved his life too.

           Not six months after the appendicitis, Gene suffered the worst headache he’d ever had in his life. He felt something pop at the back of his skull. It took his words. It stunned him. It was like being hit by a baseball bat.  It made his restless mind go silent for the first time in decades and that silence terrified him. He once met a bilingual dementia patient who paused between every word and that was how he had to talk for a while.

           The doctors said it wasn’t a stroke, and that made sense because he could still move around and talk sort of right, but for a long time after he had constant chest pain, and he couldn’t look at bright lights without getting a headache that made him feel woozy. 

           There were other things, too. Sometimes, he couldn’t… quite… get the right words. January and July, those were the months he mixed up most. At one point, he sent an apology text to Angy for all the ways he was an awful person, and she got mad at him for spelling her name wrong. He blamed it on the autocorrect, but ‘Angy’ isn’t a word that appears in any phone dictionary, and he never heard from her again.

           That was alright though. If Tegan knew he’d been talking to Angie, he never would have heard from Tegan again either. He kept it secret because Tegan cared for him and took care of him and he might have killed himself if not for the gentle touch of her crooked fingers. Talking to Angie again would have hurt her and killing himself would have hurt her, so he didn’t do either. 

           Instead, like his missing appendix, he popped, only this time it was the question. Nested diamond, traces of blue, with smaller gems embedded in divots along the helix band.

           At this point he abandoned his family. They’d never believed he was sick - not when he’d been gagging on the bathroom floor from the poison in his ruptured innards and not when he’d started mixing up words. Gene’s personality changes, they said, were all due to anxiety. This was the consensus of the doctors as well. He moved into an apartment with Tegan and they scrimped and saved until they could afford a down-payment on a house - her folk’s house, her childhood home, her dream home. Only after Tegan kicked him out could he afford to see a doctor again. That doc was a real professional and diagnosed him with something bad in his brain. Too big to cut out. Should have come in sooner.

           Oh well. 

           He’d known something was wrong. That wasn’t a surprise. He’d bought plenty of insurance through his night-shift job, too - qualified for it because everyone missed it, so it was a blessing in disguise. His life was worth enough for Tegan to see to his body, pay off the house, remodel, and live there until she didn’t anymore, and then they could be together again. 

           It was the remodeling that was the problem, though. That was how she got in contact with the other man, the construction worker. And once she’d met him, she became obsessed with his fancy car and his healthy body and his limitless goddamn money.

           Gene had to say yes. Tegan knew about how things were with Angie and though she’d been adamant about not sharing, all of a sudden, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Besides, she was so lonely every night when Gene was at work. She just wanted someone to talk to. So, he had to say yes. 

           He had to, but he wanted to. In his heart, which always ached these days, he missed Angie and he missed Angie’s husband and he thought maybe it would be like the old times before things got really bad, before he got really sick. Except it wasn’t. The first time the two made love, Tegan asked Gene to stay away from the house. He wanted to at least meet the man, share a drink, joke around a little, but when he arrived home, the house was dark. The construction worker had left like a thief in the night.

           Not even 2 weeks later, Gene was packing his boxes. The ring was somewhere, she said, and it wasn’t her fault he’d lost it. He was so forgetful, you know. Ever since whatever happened to him. If he was ever even really sick. 

           But he never forgot what his ring looked like, and when he saw it in those pictures on her profile page, he recognized it immediately, despite the pixels and the bad (bent) angle of her finger, and the happy smile that he couldn’t look away from but couldn’t bear to see. The ring. Nested diamond, traces of blue, with smaller gems embedded in divots along the helix band.

         Gene never thought he would see it again. He zoomed in enough to be sure, until it was abstract pointillism, and that didn’t help, but he convinced himself.

         Only one question remained: what to do about it? He knew he was dying - so nothing to lose - but because he was dying - nothing to gain. He stared at the picture. He stared at it until morning. He stared at it until his phone battery died and then he stared at the phone. His insides were electric enough; why should it not turn on? He was buzzing because of the lie. Because of the ring. Nested diamond, traces of blue, with smaller gems embedded in divots along the helix band.

         What to do about it? What to do, what to do, what to do about it?

         He felt something pop at the back of his skull. It took his words. It stunned him. He had been here before. It was a ring.