The Word Missing From His Headstone

I said it as flat as she had.

She heard it. I watched it land on her, in the cold shop, in her own voice.

“Del says what you left off comes to a hundred and eighty-seven dollars,” I said. “The Junior and the Army, together.”

“A hundred and eighty-seven dollars,” Kim said.

I had every right to say the hard thing then. It had formed all night, in the dark, like frost on a window, and it was a sharp thing and a true one.

I looked at her with her lanyard crooked and her mascara gone, forty-three years old, doing sums on a dead man’s name because she thought she was being kind.

And I found the sharp thing had gone out of me.

“You did not take it off me,” I said, quietly. “You took something away from him. That’s the part I can’t give back to you for free.”

She nodded. She did not argue. That, I will say, is the thing I held onto afterward.

“I’ll fix it,” she said. “Del, whatever it costs. I’ll pay it twice.”

“There’s a restencil fee,” Del said gently. “Sixty dollars, on top of the lines.”

“Then I’ll pay all of it.” She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “Eileen, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to say it.”

“Don’t say it too fast,” I told her. “I’d like you to say it again when you’ve had some time with it.”

Del cleared his throat.

“If you’d like to put it right,” he said, “here’s what I would do. Peel the left panel and cut a new one. Roy E. Tisdale Jr. on the first line. Under the dates, Specialist Four, United States Army, Vietnam, with the star. The right side stays as it is. I’ll move the cutting to the next open Wednesday, which is the fourteenth of October.”

“Do it,” Kim said.

“Kim has to sign the change,” Del said. “Here, not by phone. It’s the rule.”

He laid the change form flat on the cart beside the stone and handed Kim a pen. She bent over it and wrote K. Tisdale in a hand that shook, and the date.

Then, without anyone asking her, she wrote in the margin. I did not read the proof. Please read every letter aloud to me before cutting.

“Del,” she said. “Before you blast, would you read it out loud, with all of us there?”

“I would be glad to,” he said.

We went out together. At the door Kim hung back and waited by the Buick while I got the key out, standing very straight, like someone told to wait outside a classroom.

“Eileen,” she said. “Are you still going to…”

“I’m going to love you as I did yesterday,” I said. “I’m just going to be very slow about forgetting this.”