The Ring

 Growing up on a fishing boat docked in this small northwest

coastal town brought stares from townspeople and jeers from
classmates. She desperately wanted to escape but, with
competitors driving down charter prices, she knew her dad
would never be able to afford a replacement. As she sliced
open the belly of yet another salmon, her eyes widened and
she dropped her knife...
Seeing a flicker of gold—or was it silver?—
inside the fish, she laid her knife aside and deftly open the flesh
of the salmon.  She tugged lightly, and was rewarded with success.
A ring! A platinum and diamond ring to be exact!  She was practically
salivating, thinking of how much the ring could be sold for; perhaps her
Dad could have that replacement fishing boat yet…..when she noticed
something oddly familiar about the ring.  It looked just like her mother’s ring,
from what she remembered.  She washed the ring off with water, wanting to
get a better look at it. Suddenly she remembered that her mother’s ring was
engraved, and scrambled to get a closer look at the inside of it, to see if
the impossibility of what she thought could actually be true.  She held her
breath……and there it was…..her parents initials and their wedding date engraved
inside the ring.
But how could it be?? All her life she’d been told that her mother had
left them
when she was a baby.  But she wouldn’t be finding the ring in this
salmon now, if that
were truly the case, would she?  Did her mother really leave for good?
 Was she still
alive? Did she want to come back to them?  How did her ring come to be
buried in
the salmon?  So many questions to ask her father, when he came in from
fishing for the
day.  She turned the ring over and over in her hand and waited.