The Word Missing From His Headstone

She nodded. She didn’t ask for more. I think the asking would have told me something I did not want to know.

“I’ll earn it,” she said.

“Then that’s something,” I said.

Scott called that night from a motel in Atchison County, because Kim had phoned him from the parking lot. He did not say hello.

“She texted me the wording the week you were in the hospital,” he said. “I read it between poles, in the bucket truck. I wrote back, sounds right, whatever you think. I read the words and I didn’t read the name. It was my father, Mom, and I answered it like a work order.”

“Scott.”

“I signed off on it as much as she did.”

“The two of you did what two worn-out people do,” I said. “And I did it first. I sat in a hospital bed and said whatever you think, honey. I looked straight at that page.”

“Dad would have found it in a second,” Scott said, and his laugh turned halfway into something else. “He read the fine print on a seed bag.”

“Yes,” I said. “He did.”

It was not a clean mending. There was a week when I did not call her and she did not call me, and I felt a small hard stone of my own under my ribs, one I was ashamed of, and I prayed about it in the evenings by the window.

Then, on a Thursday, there was a knock on my door. It was Kim, with Brandi, who is eleven, and a Tupperware of soup.

“I made too much,” Kim said.

She had not made too much. She had made enough for three days. We both knew it. I let her in.

On Wednesday the fourteenth I stood in Del’s cold shop with Kim and Scott, and Del read the new stencil aloud, every letter, the way a man reads out the banns.

“Roy. Eugene. Tisdale. Junior, the J and the R and the period.”

He read the dates. He read the line below them.

“Specialist Four. United States Army. Vietnam. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” said Kim.

“Is that right?” he said again, louder, to the room. And I heard Scott say, “That’s right, Del,” in a voice I had not heard from him since he was a boy.

“Then I’ll start the sand.”

The stone was set on Saturday, the twenty-fourth of October. A bright cold morning with the sky scrubbed clean. The ground at Prairie Rest had not yet frozen, and the cemetery man had marked the footing with orange paint, and Del had come with his crew and a little truck with a boom.