Part 3 — The Plot Beside
Amber set the papers on the table, and nobody touched the ham. The little girl stood beside her mother, holding the two halves of the gold shell, looking from face to face. I put my hand on her hair and told her she had done exactly right, and that the five dollars was in my apron for her, along with five more.
Rusty broke the silence. “Dad, who is she?” he said. “You told me she moved to Florida.” Harold stared at the second receipt in the hands of his daughter-in-law. The name on the double headstone, in the neat letters of the monument company, was Delores Hatcher.
I knew the name, though I had never met the woman. Forty years ago, before Harold ever met the mother of Rusty, Delores had been his girl in high school. When I married him, he told me she had wed a man from Dayton and moved away. For sixteen years I believed it. A month earlier the woman at the cemetery office had told me otherwise: Delores had come back to Ohio last spring, a widow, and had paid the deposit on the plot beside the one Harold bought in January.
“She is only a friend,” Harold said. “We are two old people who knew each other.” I said I would like to believe him, and I asked one question. “Does she know you are married?” He looked at his plate. “She thinks I am a widower, Marce. I said I would tell her when the time was right.”
At that, Amber put her hand over her mouth. Rusty sat back like a man who has been struck. And I did what I had decided to do weeks before, with the papers in my sewing drawer and my hands quite steady. I took out my phone and called Delores Hatcher on the number the cemetery office had given me, and I put her on speaker in front of everyone.
She answered on the second ring, in a pleasant, tired voice. I told her who I was. There was a long silence, and then she said, “Oh, my dear. Oh, no.” She had been told that Harold lived alone, that his wife had died, that his son did not speak to him. She said she had never agreed to a double headstone; she had agreed only to a single stone and a quiet neighbor to rest beside. She was crying. She said she would go to the monument company herself in the morning.
I thanked her for her honesty and ended the call. The kitchen was so silent that I could hear the clock. Harold looked ten years older than he had that morning, a man watching the whole of his arrangement fall in a pile on the tablecloth.
There was still the matter of the money, and I had the papers for that, too. The account was in the names of Harold and Rusty, but the plot fund came from the monthly savings of a marriage. Under the law of Ohio I was entitled to my half of it. A lawyer from my church had already written to the cemetery to reverse the refund and restore my plot, and a letter to the bank had put a hold on further withdrawals.
Rusty looked at the floor. “The truck was thirty-eight thousand,” he said. “I do not have it.” “Then you will sell it,” Amber said, before I could, and I loved her for it. He nodded slowly, nineteen again, and said he would bring the title on Monday.
Harold asked if I would stay. I told him I would stay long enough to see the plots put right, the stone corrected, and the finances separated, and that after that I would decide with a clear head. He did not argue. He said it was fair.
I did not raise my voice once. I have found in sixteen years of trying with Rusty that quiet is stronger, because a loud person can be argued with and a quiet one can only be answered. Amber poured water for the children. Harold sat with his hands open on the tablecloth like a man who has lost something small and is only now learning how large it was. Nobody carved the ham, and nobody left.
Where we are laid to rest matters less than who stood beside us while we were alive.
By June the refund had been repaid, and my plot sat once more beneath the maple on the hill. Delores ordered a single plain stone for herself in a quiet corner on the far side. Rusty sold the black truck and drove a used sedan to work, and every Sunday morning he brought his daughter to my house.
On the table that Easter morning, the little girl set down a gold-painted shell she had saved, empty, with a five dollar bill folded inside. “For next year, Grandma Verna,” she said. I stirred the dye cups and let her help, and the whole kitchen smelled of vinegar and spring.
