One More Line on Elmer’s Stone

The funeral lunch was in the church basement. Ham on buns, three kinds of potato salad, and more kolaches than two hundred people could eat, because in Wilber that is how you say you are sorry. I stood by the coffee urn for two hours and people held my hands.

Debra came over near the end. She was forty-six, and she had her father’s long jaw and her mother’s dark hair, which I knew from the one photograph of Joan that had always stood on the piano. She had driven down from Lincoln with her husband, Jeff.

“You don’t need to trouble yourself about the stone, Nadine,” she said. “I’ll see to it.”

“Oh, honey, you don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.” She set her paper cup down on the table. “That’s family.”

She said it gently. She even touched my arm. Ardis was standing right there with a plate of bars and I saw her eyes go to Debra and then to me.

That’s family.

I had told myself she meant: you are family, so let me carry this for you.

Standing at Mr. Blaha’s counter with the drawing in front of me, I understood she had meant the other thing.

“What happens now?” I asked him.

“Whatever you say.” He folded his arms over his apron. “You hold the lot. If you tell me to stop, I stop, and I mail Debra her eleven hundred back, and you and I start over with a clean sheet of paper. If you tell me to put your name on it, I can redraw it for three names. It will be crowded, on a stone this size, but I can do it.”

“And if I say nothing?”

“Then I’d need the permit signed, and the balance before I set it. The stone, the base, the foundation and the setting come to thirty-seven hundred and forty. Less her deposit, that leaves twenty-six hundred and forty.”

“Did she say how she meant to pay the balance?”

He hesitated.

“She asked if she could pay it off through the winter. I told her that was fine. We don’t set till the frost is out of the ground anyway.”

So Debra, who worked the billing desk at a dentist’s office and had a boy in his second year at the community college, had put down eleven hundred dollars she likely did not have to spare, and meant to scrape up the rest fifty and a hundred at a time. To put her father beside her mother. To make sure of it before I could.

I had not expected that part. It is harder to be angry at somebody who has gone without to do you wrong.

“I’d like to think on it overnight,” I said.

“You take as long as you want, Mrs. Novak. That stone isn’t going anyplace.”

I sat in Elmer’s pickup in front of the monument works for twenty minutes with the engine off. I am not proud of everything I thought in those twenty minutes.

I thought: one word. Mr. Blaha said it himself. One word from me and she gets her money back in an envelope.

I thought about calling her. I had her number right there in my purse. Sharp as I was feeling, I had sense enough to know how it would go. Anything I said to Debra on the telephone would be a stepmother asking for room. She would hear it that way, and so would I.