Elizabeth didn’t sleep well. She woke every few hours, either to some noise or because she was uncomfortable. She dreamt of the old man and the ring, a different dream every time she fell asleep. They were in the diner, but it was only the two of them in there. She sat on the ground by the booth for some reason she couldn’t remember. He reached to help her up, but as she went to take his hand, she watched as the thin, wrinkled skin began to change. It tightened, and color returned to it. It seemed more alive than ever, but shifted in form.

The sunspots disappeared, the hair lessened, the knuckles became less worn, but the ring stayed the same, always in the same spot. It changed to fit his finger; it was always the perfect size, but other than that, it stayed the same, glowing gold the whole time. She looked up at his face, and it too changed. The hair grew stronger in color, and the wrinkles faded away. But his eyes never altered. They were a deep brown, but when the light hit them, they seemed to have flecks of gold all throughout.

She told Jules about the dream when she woke up. She ignored her attempts to ask how she was feeling for the moment and told her about his eyes. Jules ignored the description. She’d been awake for a few hours by the time Elizabeth was up.  Elizabeth felt less groggy, but her face was sore; so was the back of her head. Hearing that relaxed Jules a little.

Jules said that the sisters had come to visit while she was under. She’d also called her parents to tell them that she was okay, but in the hospital. She promised to have Elizabeth call when she woke up, if she was feeling up to it. Elizabeth wasn’t, but knew that her dad would stress himself stupid if she didn’t. She braced herself for the myriad of questions she was about to get, and asked Jules to call them. The phone barely rang once before her mom picked it up. Jules turned on the speakerphone.

“Hi, Lizzie, how are you feeling?” she asked in a soft voice. Then her voice changed to a shout that made Elizabeth wince. “Archy, Lizzie’s on the phone; get down here now.”

Her mom, Hazel Brown, was a loving hard-ass. She came from money, but didn’t believe in giving handouts to her one and only child. She worked in finance; Elizabeth couldn’t ever remember the company’s name.

There was a sound of shuffling and a shirt being rubbed on the speaker, then her dad’s voice spoke up.

“Hi, honey.” He was far away from the microphone, almost assuredly finishing something as he talked. Either cleaning or reading a book or something.

“Hi,  Dad. I’m doing okay; my head hurts,” she said. She knew they wanted to ask questions about what happened, so she figured she may as well skip over the simple stuff.

“Honey, what happened?” her mom asked softly.

“It was a lot,” Elizabeth started before her mom cut her off again.

“Sorry, honey, one second. ARCHIBALD, PUT THE WOOD CARVING DOWN AND COME LISTEN TO YOUR DAUGHTER,” she screamed away from the phone. Elizabeth blushed and mouthed ‘I’m sorry’ to Jules, who managed to stifle her bark of laughter.

“I was listening, for the record,” Dad said, closer to the microphone this time. “Your mother just doesn’t believe in multitasking. Or inside voices.”

An audible smack and a playful “hey” from the other end made it evident that Mom had hit Dad on the arm. While the yelling wasn’t great for her headache, she did appreciate that they still acted like themselves, even when they were assuredly worried about her. Time may change, but they never did.

Elizabeth’s dad, Archibald Brown, had been a fuck-up when he met her mom, Hazel. “Archy” was a 22-year-old college dropout, and Hazel was a 26-year-old accountant for a prestigious firm in Orange County. They’d met because Archy and a friend of his had crashed a “high society” party that they’d heard about by sheer coincidence, which Hazel happened to be attending. Every time her dad told the story, which was often, the house the party was hosted in got nicer, and the exploits he and his friend had to perform to get in without being noticed flourished into scenes from a heist movie. He fancied himself a dashing James Bond breaking onto Juliette’s balcony beneath the moonlit night.

Unfortunately for Archy, he was not nearly as well-funded as a government spy. When he got Hazel pregnant after eight months of dating, he panicked. Whenever her mom described telling him she wanted to keep the baby, she made sure to say that Archy made a cartoon gulping noise.

“I told him that he didn’t need to stay, it was his decision, but I was having you no matter what,” she’d say.

Her dad said he would be the best father that he could with a confident smile and a romantic kiss. As soon as he’d left her place that night, he threw up in Mom’s driveway. He had next to no prospects. He’d already bounced from job to job three times in the eight months they’d been dating and had just been fired from a fourth. He was going to be a dad. He also had to marry this woman. Not that it was a bad thing, he’d say to save himself a slap, he just didn’t realize he’d have to think about that part for a while longer.

He had the natural and adult response to finding out life-changing information: he went to the nearest hole-in-the-wall bar and drank himself stupid. When he told this part of the story, he got very dramatic.

“I walked through the saloon doors and sidled up to the bar. The bartender slid me a double of whiskey as I sat, and I caught it in my hand, sighed, and downed it in one swig,” he’d say. Hazel would roll her eyes at that. He couldn’t drink whiskey without wincing, and everyone knew it.

He’d go on to describe how, after that drink, a gentleman sitting directly next to him asked him about his woes. He went into incredible detail about his life, and the stranger was fascinated by the whole tale and applauded his bravery for deciding to stay.

“Ah, brave I may be, but courage and foolishness are so oft two sides of the same coin,” her dad would recite as if giving a Shakespearean soliloquy, “for I have no future, and my child will have no future with me as its father.”

And then the gentleman listening to the conversation piped up in a wise voice: “Well, good sir, you may be in luck. I happen to be the owner of this bar, and your story has moved me. How would you like a job washing dishes?”

Archy dropped to his knees and thanked the kind man who had saved him. He vowed to be the best dishwasher he could for that fateful bar.

“And the name of that bar was…” he’d turn and ask his wife.

“Elizabeth’s,” she’d say with a voice that was supposed to be annoyed, but a smile that couldn’t be faked.

“So, you see, young Lizzie,” he’d say to his daughter, “life has a funny way of working itself out. Sometimes, you just get lucky.”

Her mom insisted that it wasn’t a great lesson to teach, but her dad lived by the words. And, surprisingly, it had worked out pretty well for him. Elizabeth inherited that ideology. He worked at the bar for ten years, until the owner, who her dad called Mr. Henderson, decided to sell the business to Archy and Hazel Brown, who used the money that they’d saved and a well-timed inheritance. They kept the name. She worked there whenever she went home from college for the summer.

Editor: Shannon Hensley