Page 93 of Free Heart
Dan accepts this all without question in his usual way and exits with his crutch from the passenger side.
“Hey, stranger,” Helki says, rising from his seat and brushing the wood shavings from his lap. They float away on the cool breeze that cuts through the trees. Lowell takes a deep breath of the piney evergreen scent and steps forward. “Long time, no see.”
It’s been over a year since he’s been out this way. There are reasons for that, but they don’t bear thinking about right now.
“Helki…” Lowell says, embracing him. He’s grown thinner in the last year or two, but he’s looking healthy enough. “This is my friend, Dan. He’s looking for a ring for his man.”
Helki turns to Dan, who’s balancing on a single crutch that he doesn’t entirely need unless he becomes unsteady. He grips his hand briefly, and then gestures toward the house. “You can have a look.”
Helki is one of only three-and-a-half-thousand Miwok, a tribe of native people in Yosemite Valley. He’s been making jewelry and art for as long as Lowell has lived here, and he knows Helki’s work will resonate with Dan and Sejin much more than anything in a chain jewelry store.
Once inside, it takes Dan all of fifteen seconds to find what he wants. “This one.”
It’s in the first case of men’s jewelry Helki pulls out, nestled in the velvet cloth, a smooth, wooden circlet inlaid with blue tourmaline mountains and an opal moon.
Helki doesn’t suggest he look at other options. He simply takes the ring out, polishes it up, lets Dan hold it a moment, and then packs it into a tiny velvet jewelry box. “That’s an even hundred.”
Dan doesn’t hesitate. He pulls out his phone and asks, “Venmo?”
Lowell’s surprised when Helki says yes. In the past, Lowell’s only ever seen him take cash.
Once they’re back in the car, Dan cradles the ring box before stuffing it into his coat pocket, and Lowell asks him, “Where’d you get the cash for a ring anyway?”
“The last of my trust fund. I took out the final few hundred before the hospital could. They’ll get enough pounds of my flesh. I wanted this last little bit for Sejin.” He looks conflicted for a moment, but then goes on, “I used to see that fund as a reminder that I’d been ditched by my mom.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But when I was stuck in bed…” He tilts his head as if really considering his next words. “I decided to see it as a gift.”
Lowell hadn’t known that Dan even had a trust fund. “Your father left it to you?”
“No. My grandfather. No idea who my father was. When I was with my fifth foster family, they sat me down and let me know that my mother—who’d never visited me after relinquishing me to the state—had died. I didn’t cry. I couldn’t because I didn’t remember her well enough to cry. I hadn’t harbored any fantasies that she’d come back for me, either.”
Lowell shifts gears to aim the truck up toward Peggy Jo’s place, staying silent. This is the most he’s ever learned about Dan’s childhood, aside from those YouTube videos from earlier in the month.
“When the trust fund came in four years ago…” He shrugs. “It pissed me off.”
“Too much, too late.”
“It wasn’t ever that much money, actually, but it was enough to get me by until now. I should have felt grateful, but I didn’t. I didn’t think it made up for being abandoned. But when I was stuck in bed last month, I remembered a few things. I remembered how he hit her. I remembered her cries.” Dan touches the velvet box. “Can you imagine hitting Jeanie?”
Lowell swallows hard and shakes his head, feeling nauseous at the thought.
“Me neither. I realized then my mom gave me up to get me away from the house. If the money came from him, it was because he had no one left to give it to after she died, not because he cared about me or my future. He must have known where I was the whole time.”
“Rough.”
Dan shrugs. “I decided while I was laid up that, in a way, the money came from my mom, not him. It was her last gift to me. She wouldn’t want it to go to stupid medical bills. She’d want it spent on something that proves giving me away meant I’d found a better life than what she could have provided.”
“You found Sejin.”
Dan smiles. It’s not a big, face-splitting smile, but a tender curl of his lips. His love is impossible not to see. “Yeah. I found Sejin. This ring is perfect. Thanks for keeping me from making a mistake.”
“Any time.”
Lowell sighs, moving out onto the main road back to town.
If only he could figure out how to get Dan to see that Heart Route is a mistake too.
