The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

“I’ll keep it,” she said.

We walked her back to my truck. Kurt carried the lawn chair. At the truck, he stopped and turned to me. He did not look at me straight. He looked at a spot just past my shoulder.

“I’ll pay you back,” he said. “I know I said that kind of thing before. I know it doesn’t mean much.”

“It means something if you do it,” I said.

He nodded. “I closed the lot in June. I’m working at the tire shop now. I can do two hundred a month.”

“Then do two hundred a month.”

He did. I want you to know that. The first envelope came in November, slid under the door at the seed shed with no note, just two bills folded in half. Another came in December. They have not stopped.

I do not spend that money. I put every dollar of it in a coffee can, and when it is full I am going to give it to the county road crew’s Christmas fund in Dad’s name. I have not told Kurt that. Maybe I will someday.

Mom goes out to the cemetery every Sunday after church now. I drive her. She sits in her lawn chair by the stone and drinks her coffee and tells Dad about the week: who is sick, whose grandson got married, what the beans made, how the roads look.

“The gravel on the Blencoe road is washboarding,” she told him last month. “Somebody ought to do something.”

She runs her fingers over the little grader every time before we leave. The granite is cool and smooth, and she touches it the way you would touch a sleeping baby’s back.

Kurt comes out sometimes too. Not every week. But I have seen his truck in the lane on a Saturday morning more than once, parked by the cedars, and I have seen the pea gravel around Dad’s stone raked smooth when I know I did not do it.

Last Memorial Day, the three of us stood there together for the first time. Mom brought peonies in a coffee can. Kurt brought a little flag. I brought nothing but my hands, and I used them to straighten the flowers.

Nobody had to pull grass away with their bare hands. Nobody had to bend close to read Dad’s name. It was right there, cut in granite, in the sun, where the whole county could see it.

Mom hummed the first verse of “In the Garden” while she fixed the peonies, the way she does at the kitchen sink. Kurt stood beside her and, after a while, he hummed it too.

Elwood came by that afternoon. He did not say much. He stood by the stone a minute, touched his cap, and told Mom, “Grading weather today, Edith.”

“It is,” she said. “He’d have been out in it.”

As for the tin marker, Mom kept her word. She kept it.

It sat in her garage all winter, leaning against the wall by the garden tools. In May, when she put her garden in, she carried it out and pushed the stake down into the dirt at the end of the first row.

The tin marker is in Mom’s garden now, holding up a tomato plant.