Bernie took Eli's coat off the back of his chair and went out the side door into the cold.
It was ten degrees. The snow under the yard light was coming down slow and fine. Eli stood with his back to the building and his arms wrapped around himself, looking out at the dark lake.
Bernie held out the coat. After a while, Eli took it.
"Arne Halvorsen retired in June," Bernie said. "I catered the party. His store's been closed since the first of July."
Eli didn't say anything.
"So you couldn't have taken your grandma's ring there in July," Bernie said. "And the ring she's been wearing since then fits her just right, and it doesn't have a thing written in it."
Eli pulled the coat tighter.
"I'm not the police, Eli. I'm the guy who's been feeding you radishes since you were four."
That did it. Eli's face crumpled, and the whole thing came out in a rush.
He had taken the ring for sizing in July. When he found Arne's closed, he drove it to a jeweler in Rhinelander instead, and he was planning to pick it up the next week.
Then the transmission went out on his car.
"Twenty-six hundred dollars," Eli said. "I work nights at the mill. There's no bus. If I couldn't get to work, I'd lose the job, and if I lost the job I'd lose my apartment. I had six hundred in the bank."
So when he picked up Helen's ring from the jeweler, sized and polished, he didn't drive it home. He drove it to a pawn shop on the edge of Rhinelander and took out a loan against it.
"I was going to get it back in a month," he said. "Two months, tops. And Grandma was going to ask where her ring was. So I went to the mall in Wausau and found one that looked almost the same. Forty dollars. I had them make it in her size."
"And you gave her that one."
"She said it finally fit." Eli wiped his face with his sleeve. "She's been telling people for five months it finally fits."
"Do you still have the ticket?"
Eli took out his wallet and unfolded a pawn ticket, soft from being handled. He'd been paying the monthly fee every month to keep the loan from running out, he said.
It was good through the fifteenth. He was still four hundred dollars short.
"When Abby went to read the inside," Eli said, "I panicked. I thought if it just got lost, she'd be sad, but she wouldn't know. I grabbed the relish tray when the drinks came and pushed it under the beets."
He laughed, and it was a terrible sound. "I didn't even think about you making that tray."
Bernie looked at the lake for a while.
"Here's what I think," he said. "I think your grandpa's sitting in there right now trying to figure out who swapped his wife's ring at a supper club. And I think he deserves to hear it from you, not from me."
Eli shut his eyes.
"And I think," Bernie went on, "that my dishwasher just moved to Green Bay, and I need somebody Saturday nights through New Year's. Pays fifteen an hour, plus all the radishes you want. Four Saturdays would just about cover four hundred dollars."
Eli opened his eyes and looked at him.
"I'll walk in with you," Bernie said. "That's all I'll do. The rest is yours."
Eli told it standing at the end of the table, with his coat still on and his hands shaking, in front of fourteen people who loved him.
He told them about the transmission and the pawn shop and the forty-dollar ring from Wausau. He told them about the beets. He didn't leave anything out, and he didn't make excuses, and when he was done he put the pawn ticket on the table in front of his grandfather.
The room was very quiet.
Stan Novak picked up the ticket and looked at it for a long time. Then he started to laugh.
Helen stared at him. "Stanley."
"I'm sorry," Stan said, still laughing, wiping his eyes. "I'm sorry. It's not funny. Eli, it's not funny." He set the ticket down. "It's just that in November of 1976, I pawned my deer rifle in Rhinelander to buy that ring."
Now the whole table was staring at Stan.
"I didn't tell your grandma for ten years," he said.
"Twelve," said Helen. "I counted."
Stan reached over and put his big old hand on the back of his grandson's neck, the way he'd done when Eli was small.
"We'll go get it Monday," Stan said. "Together. You'll pay me back."
"I already got him a job," Bernie said. "Saturdays. Dish pit."
"Good," said Stan. "Make him eat the radishes."
On Monday morning, Stan and Eli drove to Rhinelander and paid off the loan, and the man behind the counter brought Helen's ring out of the safe in a small paper envelope with her name written on it in pencil.
Eli would work four Saturdays at the Loon Bay and pay his grandfather back on New Year's Eve, in cash, with a little extra.
The next Saturday night, the Novaks were back for prime rib. Just Stan and Helen this time, in the corner booth by the jukebox.
Bernie brought their old fashioneds himself. Through the round window in the kitchen door, he could see Eli at the dish pit in a white apron, eating a radish.
Helen raised her glass to Stan. On her hand, the ring caught the amber light, sized just right at last, with fifty years written inside it.