The Thousand My Wife Laughed At

In the hall she passed Ruth Dahl coming in with a jar of her chowchow for when Dad could eat again, and Diane did not know Ruth, and Ruth did not know Diane, and Diane said to me after, when Ruth was out of earshot, “Who’s the old woman? She’s got no business tiring him out. These people need to let him rest.” These people. She said it the same way she had said expenses.

I stood in that hospital hallway and I looked at my wife, and it was like somebody had cleaned a window I had been looking through for nineteen years without knowing it was dirty. I saw her whole. I saw every supper where she had talked me out of driving over to help Dad with something because it was our time. I saw every Christmas she had rushed us out of the farmhouse after an hour because it smelled like fuel oil and she could not stand it. I saw her laughing in my kitchen at a man carrying a secret too heavy and too holy for her to even imagine, a man asking for the price of a baby’s headstone, and I understood that she had not laughed because he would not say why.

She had laughed because she had already decided, long ago, that my father was a small man. And I had let her decide it. That is the part I have to live with. For nineteen years I had let the woman I married make my father small in my own mind, and it took the whole county filing through a hospital room to make him his right size again.

The Hobbs got their stone.

I did it the week Dad came home, while he was still too weak to drive out and stop me from being in the room when it went in. I took the coffee can money, and there was eleven hundred dollars in it, rolled and rubber-banded, more than enough with his six hundred to cover the sixteen, and I called the monument man, whose name is Cal, and Cal said the stone had been ready for two weeks, he just had not had the balance to deliver it.

I met Cal at the cemetery on a cold bright morning, and we set that little gray stone with the lamb on it at the head of a grave that had worn a tin marker for seven months, and Cal ran his thumb over the carved words, SHE WAS LOVED THE WHOLE TIME, and he said, “Your dad wrote that. I wanted to argue it was too many words, costs more per letter. He said he didn’t care what it cost. He said that baby’s going to be in the ground a long time and somebody ought to tell her.” Cal stood up and knocked the dirt off his knees. “Thirty years I’ve been setting his stones,” he said. “I always figured I’d be setting his before he was done. Glad I’m not. Not this year.”