The Word Missing From His Headstone

I did not say anything. I had heard there was an accident. I had not heard it from him.

“I was fourteen,” Roy said. “They let me come to the funeral and then they let me go back to school on Monday. And I thought, as long as I’m Junior, he’s still Senior. Somebody’s still got to be the one who’s his.”

He put the plate in the rack. That was all he ever said about it, in fifty years. Every time he wrote that J he was saying his father’s name out loud to the world.

His mother, Edna, died in 1998, and after that his side of the family was me, and later Scott, our boy, born in 1980, and later Kim.

Now I will tell you how I came to be at that sideboard with a drawing that did not have his father in it.

Roy died on a Sunday morning in August, the ninth. His heart. He was seventy-four and he had been tired all summer and would not see anyone about it. He sat down in the recliner after church and said he would rest his eyes, and when I came in with the iced tea he had gone where I could not follow.

I did not eat, and I did not drink, and I did not sleep. By Monday night Bonnie from across the road had driven me to the hospital in Maryville, where the doctor listened to my chest and said the word pneumonia.

I was in that bed from the tenth of August through the twenty-first. Eleven days.

They let me out for ninety minutes on Friday for the funeral. A nurse named Jessica wheeled me down in a chair with a little green oxygen tank hung on the back, and I sat in the front pew of First Methodist with a tube under my nose and listened to Pastor Sam say my husband’s name. All of it. Roy Eugene Tisdale Junior. He said the Junior, the way people who knew him did.

I remember thinking that I must be careful to remember that. That I would want it later.

It was Kim who did everything else.

I will give Kim her due, because it is true. She is forty-three. She works the front desk at the dental office on Main Street and she has two children, and the week Roy died she took vacation days she did not have to spare. She picked the casket. She called the cousins in Iowa. She made forty-one sandwiches for the lunch afterward and washed the church towels.

She did not ask me for one decision I was not able to make. I remember that clearly, and it was not nothing.