The Grave Beside My Husband
I did look at the ceiling then, I will admit it. Cora Ness stood very still beside me.
“There’s more of them,” Chester said quietly. He turned a page. “Lot 16. Spaces 5 and 6. Those are the two the computer says are full.”
“They’re sold?” Elwood said.
“They’re open. Always have been. Somebody keyed in a partial plat back in 2019 and it carried over. I’ve mowed around those two for twenty years and told anybody who asked.” He looked at the Ahrens’ gray car through the dusty window. “Nobody asked me. That’s all I’ll say about it.”
Brent Dempsey stood at the corner of the desk and read the page upside down. He read it twice. Then he took off his lanyard and set it down, and I thought he was going to say something large, but he didn’t.
“I had your number in the file, Mr. Pugh,” he said. “I looked at it twice on Tuesday. I told myself I’d be bothering you.”
“You would have,” Chester said. “That’s what I’m for.”
I walked out to the Ahrens family. It was a long way, across the frost, and nobody walked with me.
“It’s mine, Ralph,” I said. “There’s a book. Chester wrote it down eleven years ago and it’s still there.”
He nodded slowly. He did not seem surprised, and he did not seem angry, only very tired in the way a man gets when he has been braced for something for three days. “That’s what I figured,” he said. “I told Dottie last night. I said, if that woman has papers, it’s hers, and my mother would say so first.”
“I believe she would.”
“There’s nothing else in the old section, though. That’s what the man said.”
“There is,” I said. “Two spaces. Lot 16, next to Doris Boyce’s lot, in the same row of oaks. It’s about sixty feet. The book says they were never sold.”
He looked across the lane. He looked at the big oak over Lot 16, and the one past it, and the sun coming through the tops of both.
“Can I see it?” he said.
So the three of us walked over there, Ralph and Dottie and I, with Chester coming behind on his cane because he would not be left out of it. We stood in the frozen grass at the edge of Space 5. There was a little rise to it, higher than the ground around, and you could see all the way to the road.
“She’d have liked that,” Dottie said. “That she can see the road. She always sat by the window at the care center to watch cars go by.”
Ralph said nothing. He took off his feed cap and stood with it a while.
“It’s a good oak,” he said.
Elwood came up and stood beside him. “The board will move your contract to this one, Ralph. No charge. We’ll waive the opening fee for the trouble.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“It’s not a favor,” Elwood said. “It’s our mistake, and it’s the least of what we owe you.”
“Then I’ll take it,” Ralph said. “And the check can stand.”
That was all of it. There was no speech. Colin started the backhoe again and swung it across the lane toward Lot 16, and Elwood walked out in front with his hand up, pointing where to dig, the way he used to point where to blade a ditch.