Chapter 14 — TWO RINGS
I did not change my name back.
I want to say that plainly, because there is a version of this where I go to the Daley Center in September and pay thirty-one dollars and become Adele Keane and everybody feels better.
I thought about it for six weeks.
But my daughter is a Rosewood, and two hundred and eighty people have that word on their CVs, and taking it off myself would not put it back on Elena, it would only make me feel clean, and I have come to believe that wanting to feel clean is what got my mother into a room with folding chairs in Springfield in 1997 in the first place.
So instead I did three things.
I wrote it down.
All of it, with the documents, in a memorandum that is now the first item in the foundation's public file, and the first paragraph says that the name in the title of that foundation was bought at a state auction for three hundred and forty dollars and did not belong to my family, and it names Elena M. Rosewood, and it says what happened to her.
Second, the foundation now funds one thing it did not fund before, which is a small unit of two people who do nothing but locate the owners and heirs of escheated property in Cook County, for free, starting with the boxes surrendered from institutions and long-term facilities.
They have closed two hundred and nine files in fourteen months.
The largest was ninety-one thousand dollars, to a man in Blue Island who did not know his father had ever had an account.
The smallest was eleven dollars and it took them five months and I think about that one more than the ninety-one thousand.
Third, I gave the ring to Isidore Petrakis and asked him to make a second one.
Not a copy of number one.
Number two.
He had the order book, and the measurements, and the same garnet cut, and Viktor Malek's own bench, and he made it in four months and he would not take money for the labour.
Both of them went to Tess in a box on the ninth of July, which is the day Elena was admitted in 1984, and I chose that date on purpose and I told her why.
She did not want them.
I know that.
I gave them anyway, which is a thing you should almost never do, and it is the one decision in the whole of this that I would make again without thinking about it.
She keeps them in a drawer.
I saw Junie in October.
She is eight now and she has stopped selling roses because Tess got a job at a wholesaler on Randolph with hours that do not require a child in a hotel lobby, and they came to a thing the foundation did, and Junie was bored in the way children are bored at those things.
She had got hold of a rose from one of the arrangements and she was carrying it around by the stem, upside down, hitting it against her leg.
She came past me and she stopped.
She looked at my hand, which is bare now on that finger, and she looked up at my face, and I could see her deciding whether she recognised me.
She held the rose out.
She said, "Do you want this? It's free."
I said, "Sure."
And she gave it to me and went away across the room, and nobody said anything about anybody's ring, and I stood there holding a slightly damaged rose that a child had given me for no reason at all, which is what a rose is supposed to be, and what it had not been in that family for forty-seven years.