The Grave Beside My Husband
Brent was still in the office when I went back for the envelope. He had the lot book open on the desk and a pencil in his hand, and he did not look up when the door opened. He was copying Lot 14 onto a notepad.
“Mrs. Tolbert.”
“I owe you the last payment.”
“It’s in the book, ma’am. It’s accounted for.”
“It’s not. It’s $120 short of $1,320, and Chester’s book is exactly right. A contract is a contract.”
I laid the envelope on the desk. He looked at it for a time. Then he opened the cash drawer and counted the six twenties out of it, one at a time, in front of me, and made a note on a page from his pad. Received of Iris Tolbert, $120, final payment. Lot 14, Space 3. Paid in full. His name under it.
“Write it in the book,” Chester said from the doorway. He had come in on Roscoe’s arm and was leaning against the frame.
“In ink?”
“In pencil. Ink’s for the deed.”
Brent drew the eleventh tick with the pencil, small and square, next to the other ten. His hand was not steady. I watched him do it. It was a very small mark, and it took him a long time.
“The board will want to see me,” he said, not to anyone.
“They will,” Chester said.
“I should have called you.”
“You should have.”
That is all the two of them said about it that I heard. I put the yellow slip in the Whitman’s box on top of the ten pink ones and closed the lid.
Myrtle Ahrens was buried on Saturday at 11 in Lot 16, Space 5, with the sun out and a wind from the west. Roger Sieck had the whole town at that service, some who had never met her. Word goes round in a place like ours. I stood at the back with Mark, because I did not feel it was mine to sit, and through the trees I could see the sun on the top of Cal’s stone, sixty feet away across the gravel.
Ralph did not speak. The pastor read the psalm and a woman I did not know sang one verse of “In the Garden” with no accompaniment, and then the men from the mill took up the straps. When the committal was done, Ralph walked across the lane by himself and stopped at the edge of Lot 14, a long way back from the stakes, which Colin had pulled that morning. He looked at the empty square of mown grass beside my husband. He gave it a short nod. Then he went back to his family.
On Sunday afternoon Dottie knocked at my kitchen door. She had my dish towel, washed and ironed, folded in a square, and a pie in a tin from the church kitchen. We sat at my table and drank coffee and she told me about the care center, and the winter her mother-in-law fell, and I told her about Cal and the beans. At no point did either of us mention the cemetery. When she left, she took my recipe for the pound cake in her pocketbook on a card, and I have not asked her whether she ever baked it.