Sixty Wreaths on the Hill

It was Josh’s pickup, the gray one. Josh was getting out of the driver’s side. And Kaylee was getting out of the other side, without the baby.

She came through the gate and up the hill, straight down the row toward us, in her town coat and her thin gloves.

She walked past the Union soldier and the boy from France.

She walked past all fifty-nine wreaths, and she did not look left or right. Josh came behind her, slower, with his hands in his coat pockets.

The kids saw her. Kenna stopped reading. Bernadine put a hand on Garland’s shoulder without even looking at him. Noble said, “Mom?” in a small voice.

And out on the hill road, a half mile off, I could see the Legion cars coming, slow on the fresh snow, Ephraim’s old Buick in front the way it always is.

Kaylee stopped at the foot of my father’s grave. Her face was red from the cold and from something else.

She looked at the wreath in my hands, and at Noble, and at the stone.

She read the name to herself. I watched her lips move. She read the dates and the words United States Army, and she read my mother’s name below it.

Then she knelt down in the snow beside me, in her good jeans, in the wet.

For a second she did not say anything at all. She just looked at the stone.

Then she said, loud enough that all four of the kids could hear it, “Josh told me last night. All of it. Who they were for, and how long you’ve done it.”

“I threw your wreaths out, Marlys,” she said. “I knew they were yours, and I threw them out anyway. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to hear the answer. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

Kenna made a little sound behind me. Noble just looked at his mother with his mouth open.

I had promised myself no child of hers would hear it from me, and they hadn’t.

They heard it from her. That was harder. And that was right. I have thought about it many times since, and I would not change one word of how it happened.

I want to tell you I forgave her right there. I did not, not all the way.

Fifteen years of my hands and my father’s memory do not get set right by one sentence in the snow.

But I heard her. And I looked at her, really looked, and I saw a young woman who had driven up that hill road knowing every one of those Legion men would know what she did.

“He sneezed for two days,” she said, and her voice cracked on it.

“I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I lifted that tarp, and I just wanted it gone. I didn’t think about who made them.”

“I know he did,” I said. “I raised a sneezer myself.” I looked over her head at Josh, who was standing back a little way. “That one there sneezed every Christmas till he was five.”

Josh almost smiled. Kaylee wiped her nose on the back of her thin glove.

She looked down at the lopsided wreath in my hands, with its bow hanging over like a dog’s ear.

“Would it be all right,” she said, and stopped. She tried again. “Would it be all right if I put that one down? For your dad? I know I don’t have any right to ask.”