My Wife Started Hiding Her Rings in the Freezer

The Peas Rattled

I found the first one in March, in a packet of frozen peas. I was making Sunday lunch in our kitchen in Waterkloof Ridge, the way I have done since I retired from the municipality, and when I shook the peas into the pot something hard clinked against the steel. I fished it out with a fork. It was Annatjie's engagement ring, the small diamond in its old yellow setting, so cold it stung my fingers.

I stood there for a long time with the ring on the draining board and the peas boiling over. Then I dried it on a dish cloth and carried it through to the lounge, where she was doing the crossword in pen, the way she always has.

"Look what I found," I said.

She looked at it, and then at me, and her face did something I had not seen before. It was not confusion exactly. It was the look of a person caught in a lie they do not remember telling.

"Somebody has been in the house, Willem," she said quietly. "I had to put it somewhere safe."

Nobody had been in the house. Only the two of us, and the cat, and the gardener on a Thursday.

The Word the Doctor Used

We had the diagnosis by then, though I had not quite said it out loud to anyone except our son in Durban. The neurologist at the clinic in Hatfield was a kind young woman who spoke slowly and kept her hand flat on the desk while she talked, as if steadying it. Early onset Alzheimer's, she said, though at seventy-one I did not think anything about it was early. She told us that hiding things was common. People feel the world getting slippery, she said, and they try to hold on to what matters by putting it where nobody can take it.

What I did not expect was how thorough Annatjie would be. She was a primary school secretary for thirty years. She ran the whole of Laerskool Constantiapark from a desk the size of a door, and she never lost a single permission slip. So when she hid things, she hid them properly.

Over the next months I found her mother's gold chain inside the tea caddy, coiled under the rooibos. Her eternity ring was in the soil of the potted fern on the stoep, wrapped in a bank packet. A pair of earrings I bought her in Swakopmund in 1989 turned up in the toe of my own church shoe. A charm bracelet with a little silver Table Mountain on it was taped behind the bathroom mirror. Every time, the same quiet explanation. Somebody had been in the house.

I stopped arguing. You learn quickly that arguing with the disease only frightens the person inside it.

What a Day Costs

By winter it was clear I could not do it alone anymore. Not because Annatjie was difficult. She was mostly herself, sweet and dry and still able to beat me at Scrabble on a good afternoon. But she had begun leaving the house. Twice she walked to the Spar on Rigel Avenue without telling me, and once I found her at the bus stop on Lois Avenue with her handbag and no idea where she meant to go. I could not sleep properly after that. I could not go to the toilet without listening for the front door.

Our son wanted us to move into a care home. I was not ready, and neither was she. What we needed was a day carer, somebody calm to sit with her four or five days a week so I could buy groceries and see my doctor about my own blood pressure, which had begun to make its opinion known.

We found Precious through a friend from church. She had looked after an old man in Lynnwood for six years until he passed. She was patient and funny and Annatjie liked her within an hour, which was more than Annatjie had ever said about my sister. But a good carer is not cheap, and nor should she be. My municipal pension covers the house, the medical aid, and the petrol. It does not stretch to another salary.

I sat at the dining room table one night with the bank statements and a calculator that used to belong to Annatjie, and I knew what was in that house that could make the numbers work. It was all those rings and chains, the ones she kept hiding from invisible thieves.

Asking Her

I could not just take them. That was the thing that kept me awake. Forty-four years of marriage and I had never once touched her jewellery box without asking. It would have felt like being the very burglar she was so afraid of.

So I waited for a good day. They still came, in those months, like a break in the clouds. One Tuesday in July she woke up clear. She knew the date. She asked after our grandson's rugby. She made the coffee herself and remembered I take it without sugar now.

I sat her down on the stoep, in the thin sun, and I told her the truth. I told her about the bus stop and the Spar. I told her about Precious and what it would cost. I told her I had found her rings in the peas and the fern and my shoe, and I had been keeping them in my sock drawer, which made her laugh because it was exactly the kind of place she would have chosen.

Then I asked if she would let me sell some of them.

She was quiet for a while. A hadeda was making a terrible noise on the neighbour's roof. Then she said, "Not the engagement ring. Not Ma's chain. The rest, Willem, I don't even remember why I wanted them."

She said something else too, which I wrote down that night so I would not lose it. She said, "I would rather have somebody here who is kind to me than a box of things I keep hiding from myself."

The Kitchen Table and the Scale

I knew nothing about selling gold. I had a vague idea of a shop in a mall with a neon sign, and a man who would look at me as if I were a fool. My son, who does everything on his phone, sent me a link and told me to read before I went anywhere. He said to look at a few Jewellery Buyers first and understand how they weigh and test, so nobody could rush me.

That advice mattered more than I realised. I learned that the price is mostly about the gold content and the weight, not the sentimental story, which was a strange relief. I learned what nine carat and eighteen carat mean, and that the little stamps inside a ring tell you most of what you need to know. I bought a cheap kitchen scale and weighed every piece myself on the dining table under the lamp, writing each one down in Annatjie's own school-secretary handwriting style, neat columns, because it felt like she was helping.

Annatjie sat beside me for part of it. She picked up the Swakopmund earrings and held them to the light. "You bought these because you forgot our anniversary," she said. She was right. I had.

The Day We Went In

When I decided to Sell Gold Jewellery for real, I took Annatjie with me. Precious came along too, in the back seat, because by then the three of us had become a sort of small committee. I wanted Annatjie there because they were hers. I did not want her to wake up one day and feel something had gone missing behind her back. Bad enough that she already believed thieves were coming.

It was not dramatic. A young woman weighed each piece in front of us and explained the numbers plainly. Annatjie asked her two sharp questions about the testing that I would never have thought of, and for a moment I saw the woman who ran a whole school office again, and I had to look out the window.

We walked out with enough to pay Precious for most of a year. I remember thinking it was strange that a whole year of somebody's kindness could come out of a sock drawer.

What Was Left

Some people think of Cash for Jewellery as something sad, a last resort, a sign that things have gone wrong. I suppose for us it was both sad and not. The things we sold were objects Annatjie no longer recognised. What we bought with them was time she still does.

She is worse now. Most days she calls Precious by her sister's name, and some days she calls me Pa. But she still does the crossword, badly, in pen. She still hides things, though now it is mostly teaspoons and my reading glasses.

The engagement ring is on her finger. I had it resized smaller, because she has grown thinner, and I check every night before she sleeps that it is still there. Her mother's chain hangs on a hook inside our wardrobe door, where I can see it.

Last week I opened the freezer to take out some boerewors and found a folded piece of paper inside the ice tray. It said, in her shaky handwriting, Willem. Coffee no sugar.

I have not thrown it away. I put it back where she left it, somewhere safe.