THE GANGSTER'S RING

"I'd rest my head in her lap and spin that ring round and round on her finger."

When I was seven I flew solo from L.A. to Miami to stay with my grandma for two months. (While my mom traipsed around with—are you ready?—the Tijuana Brass. But that’s another story.) Grandma ran the children’s club at the Sheraton Hotel in Miami Beach. She’d toss pennies into the pool for diving competitions, organize treasure hunts, set us up outside to paint by numbers. She was Miss Sally, and everyone loved her. 

One day, in the elevator, she found a man’s pinky ring. We liked to imagine it belonged to a gangster who’d stayed at the hotel. She turned it in to lost and found, and when no one claimed it, the hotel gave it to her. She had the diamonds removed and remade into a woman’s ring.

After work, as she sat on the end of her couch watching Roger Mudd deliver the news, I'd rest my head in her lap and spin that ring round and round on her finger. She wore it on her left hand, where a wedding ring would go. Grandma was divorced. (Much later in my life she told me that her life began at 40, when her marriage ended.) Ring on her left hand, Camel cigarette in her right, we’d relax like that. Sometimes we’d sit in the kitchen and eat Sara Lee cakes—banana was her favorite—which she kept in the freezer and ate cold. After, she'd prop her elbows on the table, hands on either side of her jawline, pulling her neck skin tight. 

When I spun the ring on her finger, she promised she would one day give it to me.  

In my early twenties, on a visit, I woke up to find Grandma tearing apart her bed. She’d had a restless night, tossing and turning, hot and sticky, and in her sleep she’d thrown off her covers, her pajamas, and removed the ring. Now it was nowhere. We crawled and searched, and when we finally found the gangster’s diamond ring, snuggled deep in her white shag carpet, she gave it to me on the spot. Wearing it, I always felt protected.

Many years later, after she’d died, I sheared off the center diamond while cleaning the lint screen in the dryer. This time it really was gone. In tears, I said to my husband that it was an omen, that losing the gangster’s diamond meant something. That I had somehow failed my grandmother and now she was no longer watching over me. He said, All it means is that we have to replace the diamond.

—Natalie Serber

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