One More Line on Elmer’s Stone

He came. He stood behind me with his cap in his hands while I knelt down and pulled the grass back from the edges of that little marker with my fingers, and pressed the jar into the sod so the wind wouldn’t take it.

I said, out loud, because it seemed rude not to say something: “Joan, I’m Nadine. I’m looking after them the best I know how.”

Elmer made a sound behind me. When I got up he took my hand and held it all the way back to the truck, and he never mentioned it again, and neither did I.

We did that thirty-one times.

Every Memorial Day from 1995 on. I cut the peonies and carried the jar. Elmer brought the grass shears and trimmed around the marker, and in dry years he hauled water in a milk jug. The spring he had his hip done I went alone and told her he was sorry to miss it.

Debra always drove down in the afternoon, after the big dinner at Ardis’s. The flowers were always already there.

I am certain she thought her father brought them. I never told her different. It was not the kind of thing you announce.

That was what I thought about, the night after I saw the drawing. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold and looked out the window at where the peony bush was, cut back to brown stubs for the winter, and I thought about all of it.

I asked Elmer more than once to put up a real stone for her. Five times, maybe six, over the years.

“I will,” he always said. “I know I ought to.”

One time, the year he turned sixty, he said more than that.

“Nadine, when I order that stone, I have to tell the man what to put on the other half of it. And I have to tell him where you go. And I can’t seem to walk in there and say any of it out loud.”

“There’s room for all of us out there,” I said.

“I know there is. I bought four.”

“Then what’s the trouble?”

He rubbed the back of his neck.

“The trouble is I loved her, and I love you, and I don’t know how a man carves that in a rock so it’s fair to everybody.”

That was Elmer. He was not a coward. He pulled calves in sleet and he once walked into a burning hog barn for a neighbor. But there was this one thing he could not make come out even, so he left it lie, the way he left that peony bush unstaked for thirty years.

And now his daughter had made it come out the only way a nine-year-old would.

I did get angry that night. I will say so. Around ten o’clock I got out a tablet and wrote down what I was going to say to her. It filled a page. It had the words “after everything I did for you” in it twice.

I read it over. Then I thought about a tall girl with a lunch tray, and I thought about how long thirty-seven years is to wait for somebody to spell your mother’s name out properly.

Debra did not want me gone. I do not believe that even now. She wanted her mother not to be gone. And the only way she could see to do it was to make the stone say that the time in between had not happened.

I tore the page out and put it in the cookstove.