One More Line on Elmer’s Stone

“Debra drew that stone to tell everybody her mother was Elmer’s wife,” I said. “That’s true, and it’s on there. But she left off the part that mattered most to her. I don’t think she knew she was allowed to ask for it.”

“And you?”

“What about me?”

“Where do you go, Mrs. Novak?”

“I expect that will work itself out,” I said. “There are four spaces in that lot. I’m in no hurry to use one.”

He put the pencil back behind his ear.

“I’m not charging you the ninety,” he said.

“You are too. I’ll not have it said I got it for nothing.”

I wrote the check on the corner of the work table, right beside the stone, for twenty-seven hundred and thirty dollars. He wrote me a receipt. I signed the cemetery permit on the line that said lot holder.

“She’ll call me,” he said. “Sooner or later, about the balance. What do you want me to tell her?”

I had thought about that, too.

“Tell her the truth if she asks you a straight question. But I’d rather she saw it before she heard it. Would you let me know when it’s to be set?”

“I’ll call you both,” he said.

Ardis was in my kitchen before noon. I had known she would be. She was seventy-eight years old, five feet tall, and had driven a school bus for twenty-six years, and nothing in Saline County had ever got by her.

“Karl Blaha telephoned me for the lot book on Monday,” she said, not sitting down. “I asked him what stone. He wouldn’t say. Karl never will. So I’m asking you.”

I told her. I showed her my receipt.

She read it standing at the counter, and I watched the color come up her neck.

“That girl,” she said. “I am going to drive to Lincoln this afternoon.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Nadine. She left you off my brother’s headstone.”

“She did.”

“And you paid for it!”

“I did.”

Ardis pulled out a chair then, and sat, and looked at me the way she must have looked at children who would not stay in their seats.

“Explain it to me.”

“If you go up there, she’ll dig in,” I said. “You know she will. She’ll say her mother was his first wife, and it’s her father, and she paid for it with her own money. And she’ll be right about every bit of that. Then it’s a fight, and it stays a fight for twenty years, and every Memorial Day we stand on opposite sides of a stone.”

“So you’re just going to take it.”

“No. I’m not taking it. I’m answering it. I’m only not answering it the way she’s braced for.”

Ardis looked at the receipt again. I saw her find the line at the bottom. Additional lettering, three words, ninety dollars.

“What three words?”

I told her.

She was quiet a long while. Then she took a handkerchief out of her sleeve, which I had seen her do exactly one other time, at Elmer’s burial.

“He should have done that himself years ago,” she said.

“He didn’t know how to carve it so it was fair to everybody. He told me so.”

“Well.” She blew her nose. “That sounds like him. He couldn’t divide a pie without measuring.”

“I’m asking you a favor, Ardis. Not a word to her till it’s set.”

“That’s six months.”

“I know.”

She folded the handkerchief back into her sleeve.