The Empty Ground Beside Daddy’s Stone

What she told me

“You sold Mama’s grave.”

“I sold a hole in the ground,” Patty said. Her voice was low and flat and very tired. “Wendell Prater’s wife was dying. He wanted a spot under the cedar, and he had the cash. I have Mama’s power of attorney. It is signed, and it is legal, and it is done.”

“When?”

“Three weeks ago. Joyce passed on Thursday. Duane is burying her Tuesday.”

“In Daddy’s row.”

“In the space,” she said. “The extra space.”

“It is not an extra space, Patty. It is Mama’s.”

She picked up her purse from the kitchen chair and looked past me, through the doorway, at the recliner where Mama slept. Something worked in her jaw. For one second I thought she was going to cry. I have thought about that second a lot since.

Instead she said it again, to the room and to me and, I think now, to herself. “She won’t know the difference.”

Then she went out the back door and let the screen slam.

I stood in my mother’s kitchen with a basket of towels at my feet and a feeling in my chest like swallowing a stone.

What Daddy asked for

In the spring of 1988, Daddy drove Mama up the gravel lane to Mt. Hope Cemetery in his pickup. He had a check in his shirt pocket for one hundred fifty dollars. He bought two spaces on the hill, Lot 14, Spaces 1 and 2, under the biggest cedar, with a view down the slope of the church roof and the elevator beyond it.

Then he walked Mama out onto the grass. He put the toe of his boot beside the first space, which was his, and the toe of his other boot beside the second.

“That one’s yours, Opal,” he said. “I am not going to the hereafter without you sitting next to me.”

Mama told that story at every funeral supper in Dunmore for thirty-eight years, laughing, and people in town could say it along with her.

Daddy died four years ago in March. We put him in the first space. His half of the double stone has his name and dates. Mama’s half has her name and her birth year and a dash, and then nothing.

Mama used to go up there on Sundays after church and lay her hand on that blank patch. She called it her seat.

Now it belonged to Joyce Prater.

Why I did not make a scene

I did not follow Patty out the door and scream at her in the yard where the neighbors could hear. Mama raised us not to air the family wash, and I could see the Fenwicks’ curtain move across the fence already.

I did not call a lawyer. The nearest one is forty-five miles away in Emporia, and anyone who has ever hired one knows what comes after the first phone call. There would be a retainer, then a hearing, then a continuance, then a second hearing. Mama had weeks. Maybe fewer. I was not going to spend the last of her time on earth turning her two daughters into a courthouse story.

And I could not do it to Wendell Prater. He was eighty-four, his wife lay at Kimbrell’s, and he had done nothing wrong except trust a signature.

There was one more reason, and it was the plainest one. If Mama woke up in the night and heard her daughters fighting over where she was going to lie, I think it would have finished her.

So I picked up the towels. I folded them and put them away, and I went outside and sat in my car for ten minutes with both hands on the wheel.

Then I drove to the cemetery.