Far Above Rubies

They told the story over and over of how it had been when Melanie's Papaw got a bee in his bonnet to buy her a tiny ruby ring, a singular development because it was not really like her handsome Papaw to act upon (or even have) sentimental impulses. She was only three and a half at the time and not yet talking, owing to her mild and mysterious disability, but she had no trouble demonstrating a surfeit of bona fide ecstasy as Papaw gathered her up into his long arms, his hazel eyes beaming directly into hers of Wedgwood blue. "Ready to go with Papaw?" he asked, twinkling, jiggling her up and down a little as she flung her tiny pale arms around his tanned neck by way of joyous assent, and those witnesses assembled laughed out of gut-wrenching love for them both. They recounted how that all the way to Wal-Mart she'd babbled to the back of his head from her lawful ensconcement in the regulation carseat with its many baffling buckles, and he'd nodded in all the right places and said "Oh, okay," and "Sure, Mel," a time or two, just so she wouldn't think he wasn't listening. She knew he was. What they could not tell of that story, because they could not know, was that she told herself on the way home (even transfixed as she certainly had been by the way the sunlight probed the tiny ruby ring glowing on her right hand just before she fell asleep), that he was listening with more than only his ears.

Comments

[June]

How sweet! I loved it!

[Jennifer]

Thanks, luv. I don't know if they make ruby rings as tiny as Mel's li'l fingers, but if they do I think I'll take her Papaw shopping for her one! Maybe for her fourth birthday ...