One More Line on Elmer’s Stone

Zion Hill sits on a rise four miles west of town, with a row of cedars on the north side and a pipe gate.

Mr. Blaha and his grandson had the truck backed in when I got there. They had poured the foundation the week before. The stone was hanging from the boom in two wide straps, turning a little, and the boy steadied it with one hand while his grandfather eased it down onto the base.

Ardis stood by the cedars with her arms folded, wearing her good slacks. Two of Elmer’s cousins had come out as well, old men in seed caps who had known Joan.

At five minutes to ten a blue car turned in at the gate, fast, and stopped behind Elmer’s pickup.

Debra got out alone. She had on her office clothes. She shut the car door harder than it needed and came across the grass with her purse clamped under her arm and her chin up, and I knew that walk. I had watched it cross a school cafeteria when she was fifteen.

She did not look at the stone. She looked at me.

“I want to say something before anybody else does,” she said. Her voice was shaking. “I paid the deposit on that stone. I picked it. He was my father, and she was my mother, and they were married eleven years, and she has been lying out here with nothing for thirty-seven…”

“Debra,” I said.

“No. You’ve had your turn. You went behind my back…”

“Honey. Read it.”

She stopped. Maybe it was the honey. I had not called her that since the funeral lunch.

Mr. Blaha’s grandson unhooked the straps and stepped out of the way.

Debra turned around.

I watched her eyes go across the top, to the name. Then down the right side, to her father. Then she looked for me. I saw her do it. She looked along the bottom and at the base and all down Elmer’s side, and her forehead creased, because I was not there.

Then she looked at her mother’s side.

Joan. 1955 to 1988.

Mother of Debra.

She read it twice. I could see her lips move the second time.

Her purse slid out from under her arm and dropped in the grass, and she didn’t pick it up.

Nobody spoke. A meadowlark went off on the fence.

“I don’t understand,” Debra said. She was not talking to me. She was talking to Mr. Blaha. “You said she added a line.”

“She did,” he said. “That’s the line.”

“Where’s her name?”

“She didn’t ask for her name.”

“But she could have. You told me the lot was hers. She could have stopped the whole thing.”

“She could have stopped it with one word, the day I showed her your drawing.” Mr. Blaha took off his cap. “I offered. I offered to redraw it for three names, too. She told me not to change one thing you’d picked. She wrote me a check for the whole balance on my work table and paid ninety dollars extra for those three words, and I couldn’t talk her out of the ninety. That’s what was ordered, and that’s who paid for it. I’ve been at this forty years, young lady, and I wanted you to hear it from the man who cut it.”

Debra put her hand flat against her mouth.

Ardis came across from the cedars then. Six months is a long time for Ardis to hold anything.