The Word Missing From His Headstone

On the eighteenth, a Tuesday, she came to the hospital after her shift with a folder.

I was sitting up by then but I was not what you would call clear. They had me on a drip and something for the cough that made the walls feel soft.

“Mom, it’s the stone,” she said. She sat on the edge of the chair like a girl in the principal’s office. “Scott and I went out to Strand’s yesterday. They need to order the granite now if they want it set before the ground freezes. I didn’t want you to have to think about it.”

“What does it cost?”

“It’s handled.” She said it too fast. “Del charges by the letter, and the extras add up quick. A name and the dates is all it needs. I’m not paying for words nobody reads.”

She said it flat, the way she might turn down a magazine subscription. I noticed it, and I let it go by, because I was tired and she had made forty-one sandwiches.

She held up the page. I looked at it the way you look at a menu in a language you do not read. The cross. The two names. The gray.

“Is Roy’s name right?” I said.

I asked it. I want that on the record. I asked, and I looked at the line, and I did not see what was not there, because you cannot see an absence when your eyes are swimming in cough syrup and you are looking for mistakes in spelling.

“It’s all right,” Kim said. “It’s just how he’d want it.”

“Whatever you think, honey,” I said.

And I handed her back the pencil.

That is the part that was my fault. I was sick, and I took the easy hand when it was offered, and Kim took it, and neither of us was looking.

Now I have to tell you why I did not simply pick up the telephone.

I know what a person thinks. You call Kim. You call the shop and you say stop.

But a monument company takes its orders from the name on the signed paper, and the name on the signed paper was K. Tisdale’s, not mine. Del Strand could not change a word on a stone for anyone but the person who signed for it. That is just how the business has to work.

And the call to Kim, I knew how that would go. She would cry, and I would end up comforting her, and it would be a long week of everyone being sorry on the phone while a sandblaster started up on Wednesday morning at eight.

Scott was no help. He was a lineman for the electric co-op, six days into a storm crew, and he did not pick up his phone unless a pole was down.