The Grave Beside My Husband

“Myrtle Ahrens,” Dottie said. “Ralph’s mother. She was 94. She went Monday morning at the care center, in her sleep. She’d been telling us for three years she was ready.”

A man stood up from the table when I came in. That is what I noticed first. Ralph Ahrens was 68 or so, a big, slow-moving man in a feed-mill cap he had forgotten to take off, and he stood for a stranger two days before his mother’s funeral. My own father would have done the same.

“Ralph, this is Mrs. Tolbert,” Dottie said. “Roger Sieck called.”

“I know why she’s here,” he said.

He had a piece of paper in his hand, a bank receipt folded in four. He laid it on the table and smoothed it with the side of his thumb. A cashier’s check stub. $1,650.

“We paid in full,” he said. “I want you to know that. The man told us it was the last single space in the old section. Mother’s people are all at St. Paul’s, out on Meyer Road, and that churchyard has been full since before I was married. She said she wanted somewhere with oaks. The man said Lot 14 had oaks.”

“It does,” I said.

“I’d never have taken it if I’d known.”

“I know that, Ralph.”

“Then why’s she here?” Dottie said, very quietly, to nobody. She was not being unkind. She was holding a whole house together on three hours of sleep.

I put the cake on the counter. I took off my coat. I sat down at their kitchen table, because they had not asked me to and nobody was going to, and I put the yellow box in front of me.

“I’m not here to take your mother’s grave,” I said.

Ralph let out a breath.

“I’m here to tell you who she’d be lying beside. I think you ought to know that. Nobody told you.”

And I told them about Cal.

I told them about the beans and the beets and the 43 years, and the stroke in the shed on a wet October morning. I told them what a hundred and twenty dollars was to a widow with a farm note and a funeral bill, and how I had saved it out of the egg money and the sewing money and later out of Social Security, every year for eleven years, and carried it out to the cemetery in a candy box. When I finished, I opened the box and laid out the ten pink slips in a row on their kitchen table, between the ham and the funeral program.

Dottie picked one up. She read it all the way through. Then she picked up the next.

“They never told us,” she said.

“I don’t believe they knew.”

“He sat across from us,” Ralph said slowly. “The manager. He had the map up on the screen. He ran his finger down the row and said, there, that’s the one. The last one.”

“I think the computer told him something, and he believed the computer.”

“Do you?”

“I think he’s thirty-eight and six months on the job and nobody ever told him to ask Chester Pugh anything.”