…seat cushion. You’ve ruined everything.”
I stared at my husband. The photographer stared at my husband. My husband looked at the photographer as if he wanted to throw him into the fountain.
“What did you put inside my seat?” I asked.
My husband, Harold, sighed the sigh of a seventy-year-old man whose surprise has been destroyed by a stranger with a camera. “A ring,” he said. “A very small, very expensive ring. For our fiftieth anniversary. Which is in two hours.”
The two men in the photo were our driver, Luis, and our grandson, Danny. They had spent twenty minutes trying to hide a ring box in the leather seat so I’d find it on the drive home. Danny had sewn a little pocket into the cushion himself.
The photographer’s face went from white to red. “Oh no,” he said. “Oh no, I’m so sorry.”
It turned out he’d photographed a gala the year before where a guest’s car really had been tampered with by her business partner. Ever since, he’d been watching cars a little too carefully.
“I’d rather be embarrassed than wrong,” he said. I told him that was a very good rule for life.
Harold decided the evening was salvageable. He asked the photographer to follow us outside. Luis opened the passenger door. Danny pretended to be very interested in his shoes. I sat down and felt the small lump in the cushion.
Inside the pocket was a ring box. Inside the box was my mother’s old engagement ring, which I’d sold fifty years ago to pay for our first apartment. Harold had spent eight months tracking it down through three jewelers and an auction house in Chicago.
I cried so hard I ruined my makeup. The photographer took the picture anyway. It’s the best photo anyone has ever taken of us.
He sends us a Christmas card every year now. Harold sends back a photo of the black Mercedes with the caption: “Still perfectly safe.”
