Inside the Citgo, Abigail Eggink waits with the wedding ring.
Yesterday, nine months after she found the plain gold band in her hot dog stand's tip cup, she would finally reunite the ring with its owner.
"Rose Love Bill 6-5-04," the inscription reads.
Outside, at 10 a.m. on the dot, Bill Goetz pulls up in his well-drilling truck. He walks into the convenience store to meet Eggink. She gives him the ring and he slips it on his left ring finger, on a hand gnarled by 40 years of drilling wells. It's as if it were never gone.
"I never thought I'd see it again," he says.
One day last summer, Goetz was working in the hamlet of Smallwood and he went to the stand Eggink ran at the Citgo on Route 17B. He bought fruit and hot dogs. He's not sure if he took the ring off that day to wash his hands, or while he was on the job. But it ended up in that tip cup, along with some change.
Eggink put up a sign at the hot dog stand, and took out an ad in a local shopper. When no responses came in, friends told her the ring's owner probably just threw it away.
But Eggink had faith.
Goetz and his wife, Rose Goetz, had spent weeks searching their house for the ring.
"We looked under the bed and everything," he says. "I figured, it's gone. I lost it."
Rose and Bill Goetz have been together for 20 years. They married in 2004, in a ceremony by a stream in their backyard in Thompsonville, with matching rings.
"It was something we waited so long to do. When he lost the ring, he was so upset," Rose Goetz said.
They had made arrangements to get a new ring, but the lost ring was the one the minister had blessed.
Last week, Eggink put a lost and found ad in the Times Herald-Record, and that led to a news story. The Goetzes' daughter called to tell them someone had found the ring.
"That's the only way I could get it back, because I never look in the lost and found," Bill Goetz jokes as he and Eggink stand in the Citgo. He tells her his parents were married for 71 years.
Eggink tells him she's been with her husband for 30.
They smile; their faith rewarded.
"There's still love and marriage in this world," Eggink says.
Labels: anniversary, ring, stories, tales, wedding
