(prelude here, I’ma start this one off with…)
Gordon’s last gift to his older brother was a pamphlet listing a variety of hand and wrist exercises, in an effort to help stave off the carpal tunnel syndrome that’s probably just about inevitable, considering all the typing his brother does. Of the five of them, John and Alan are the only ones who spend any time at desks any longer, and though it doesn’t happen often, occasionally John ends up with idle time on his hands, nothing to do while he sits at his desk. Come Christmastime, it becomes apparent that he’s been putting this time to productive use. It’s not clear if he’s used any of this idle time for the provided wrist exercises.
Apparently one of the other dispatchers had taught him the basics over the course of a couple lunch breaks. Apparently she’d gotten him started with a spare pair of needles, and an old skein of yarn that she’d meant for him just to practice with—by her standards, the colour of it was too bright and gaudy for anyone to reasonably want to wear, bright, chunky, golden rod yellow—but John’s a fast learner and a perfectionist, and by the end of a few particularly slow weeks, he’d had a respectable four feet worth of scarf, garter stitched the whole way through.
John says it’s nothing much, and that he won’t mind in the least if Gordon doesn’t wear it. He doesn’t even know if it’ll be particularly warm, being made of cheap acrylic yarn, nothing like high quality wool. He’d made it just to make it, after all, it was only supposed to be for practice. And anyway it’s out of regs, as far as the uniform goes.
Gordon doesn’t care. Gordon loves it. And he wears it from the depths of December, right up until the city starts to thaw out again.
Grandma used to do this when she was a girl, and the Depression made everything scare and then scarcer still.
Alan’s not sure what Scott was trying to prove, giving him something of Mom’s. Especially her wedding ring.
He shouldn’t have it. Of anyone in the family, he definitely shouldn’t have it. Alan doesn’t even remember Mom, he’d only been six when she died. Six years isn’t any kind of time to know a person, Alan doesn’t remember anything about her that means anything. His memories of Mom begin with her getting sick, and end with her coffin descending into a hole in the deep dark ground, while he’d clung weepily to one of his brothers at her graveside. He doesn’t even remember which of them it had been, he just knows for sure it wasn’t his father.
He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with his mother’s wedding ring.
Scott had given it to him for his sixteenth birthday, threaded onto a sterling silver chain that certainly wasn’t new, and might possibly have been removed from the neck of a drug dealer or similar, on their way into lock up. Alan had put it on, and now he wears it out of habit, and because he’d feel weird and ungrateful if he wanted to take it off. Which he doesn’t. Even in spite of the weirdness of the gift, and the fact that he feels guilty for having it, for some reason he also doesn’t quite want to take it off.
His mother had small hands. Alan doesn’t remember that about her, but he can determine that it’s true, from the way only his pinkie finger actually fits through the ring. Sometimes, in idle moments, he’ll lift his hand to the necklace and slip the ring over his smallest finger. He’ll think about the woman who wore the ring, and the man who would’ve put it on her finger, so many years ago. He’ll feel strange to think that hers was the last skin to have touched the inside of the ring, with its faint, faded, secondhand inscription: “Always”
Maybe Scott knew what he was doing, after all.
Rent Day Blues 