The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

But every Memorial Day she was back on her knees by that tin marker, and every Memorial Day I watched the card fade a little more.

I am a seed dealer. I sell seed corn and soybeans to farmers in three townships, and I have for 22 years. My whole job is keeping track of what people ordered and making sure it shows up. You would think I would have checked sooner.

I did not check sooner because Kurt is my brother. Because checking meant saying out loud that I thought he would lie to our mother about our father’s grave. Some things you do not want to find out.

In August, a week after Mom’s 83rd birthday, I was sitting in my pickup outside the seed shed with the windows down and the beans rustling across the road. I had the phone in my hand for twenty minutes before I dialed.

A woman named Lavonne answered at the monument company. She had a kind voice and a radio playing low behind her.

“I’m calling about a stone for Harlan Vollmer,” I said. “It would have been ordered six years ago this fall. Gray granite, upright, a companion stone with Edith Vollmer’s name too.”

“Let me look, hon.” I heard her typing, then paper. Then more paper. She was gone a long time.

“I’ve gone back seven years,” she said finally, and her voice had changed. “I don’t have any order under Vollmer. Not a deposit, not a proof, not a phone call. I’m so sorry.”

“Could it be under a different name? Kurt Vollmer?”

“I looked under the cemetery too. Onawa. Nothing for that lot.” She paused. “Is your mother still living, hon?”

“She is.”

“Has she been waiting on it all this time?”

I could not answer her. I said thank you, and I hung up, and I sat there in the truck with the beans moving in the wind and my hands shaking on the wheel.

I drove to Kurt’s lot that same afternoon. There were eleven cars on it, most of them with faded prices on the windshields. He was in the little office with a box fan going.

I did not yell. I am not a yeller. I sat down across from him and said, “I called the monument company.”

He did not ask which one. He did not ask why. He just put his hands flat on the desk and looked at them.

“I was going to fix it,” he said.

“It’s been six years, Kurt.”

“I know how long it’s been.” He did not look up. “The lot was going under. I needed it for one payment. I was going to put it back.”

“Do you have it now?”

He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. “Look around, Nadine.”

I looked around. He did not have it. He did not have much of anything.

I stood up. “Mom asked you about it every Memorial Day.”

“I know.”

“She pulls the grass off his marker with her hands.”

He put his face in his hands then, and I left him there, because if I had stayed I would have said something I could never take back.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, because my husband thought it too. Call the sheriff. Take him to small claims. Make him sign something.