The Word Missing From His Headstone

“Left off.” He took off his glasses. “It’s not the only thing, either.”

“I know. The Army, too.”

“She didn’t know,” Del said slowly. I could tell he had been turning it over since the day they came. “She asked me what lettering ran by the character, and what the extras were, the emblems and such. I told her. Optional lines are priced by the letter, service emblems on top of that. She said name and dates would do. I asked was there anything more to put on, as I always do, and she said no.”

“So you never said Junior to her.”

“I knew it was Roy Junior,” he said. “It never crossed my mind that the family would not. I never thought to say it.” He rubbed his jaw. “The Junior and the Army line, with the emblem, come to a hundred and eighty-seven dollars. That’s my tally, after the fact. Nobody said that number in this shop until right now.”

“What is the whole stone?”

“Forty-three eighty, setting included.”

Forty-three hundred and eighty dollars is a great deal of money to people like us.

I thought of the word Junior being worth, to a person who did not know, about as much as a tank of gas.

“I cannot change that order, Eileen,” Del said, as gently as a man can. “Whoever signs, signs. Kim signed. If I changed a single letter on your say-so and she came in and found it, I’d lose a good name my father spent forty years on.”

“I know it,” I said. “I’m not asking you to.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“I’m asking you to hold the stone until she comes. I want her to read it with me.”

He studied me. Del has cut ten thousand names into granite, and I think he had learned to read a face the way he read a drawing.

“I want you to ask her to come out, and say nothing else, please,” I said. “I’d like her to hear it here, where it is, and not on a telephone.”

“Well,” he said. “I can hold off the blasting on account of a scheduling matter. That’s no lie.”

He picked up the phone on the bench. But before he dialed, he set it down and looked at the wide door to the yard.

“My dad cut Roy’s father’s stone,” he said. “Out in the yard, that fall of 1966. I was twelve years old and they had me sweeping this floor. Roy was standing right there at that door with his cap in his hands while the grown folks talked. I remember because he never once sat down. A boy that age, he stood the whole time.”

He looked at the door a little longer.