The Stone Dad’s Road Crew Set

“Elwood.”

“Your dad trained me on a grader when I was a young man. Did you know that?”

Kurt shook his head.

“He was a good man. He worked every day of his life for this county and never asked anybody for anything.” Elwood held out the shovel, handle first. “There’s pea gravel to go around the base. That’s the last of it. Your dad would want his boy to finish the job.”

Kurt looked at the shovel. Then he looked at Elwood. Then he looked past him at Mom, standing by the stone in her navy cardigan with her hands folded.

He took the shovel.

There was a little pile of pea gravel by the foundation that the monument company had left. Kurt walked over to it. The men stepped back and gave him room, the way you give a man room to work.

He started shoveling gravel around the base of the stone. He did it slow and careful, the way Dad taught both of us to use a shovel: fill it, carry it level, set it down, never throw it.

Halfway through, his shoulders started to shake. He kept shoveling. Nobody said a thing. The crew stood with their caps in their hands, and Mom stood by the stone, and I stood by Mom.

When the gravel was all down, Kurt smoothed it with the back of the shovel. Then he leaned the shovel against the boom truck and stood there with one hand on top of the granite, right over Dad’s name.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. His voice broke in the middle. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

Then he turned around and looked at the crew. Three men in orange vests who had stood beside his father in sleet and dust and spring mud for thirty years.

“I used the money,” he said to them. Not to me. To them. “Mom gave me the money for this the week of the funeral, and I spent it on my lot, and I lied about it for six years. Nadine paid for this stone. I want you all to know that.”

It was so quiet I could hear the gravel settle.

Elwood nodded once. “Now we know,” he said. That was all he ever said about it, then or since.

I want to tell you that I felt good watching that. That I had won something.

I did not feel like I had won anything. I felt tired, and sad, and a little sick, and also something else I did not have a name for until later. I think it was relief. The thing was finally out in the open air where Dad could see it.

I did not say anything to Kurt right then. I did not need to. He had said it himself, in front of the men whose opinion would have mattered most to our father. Nothing I could have said would have weighed more than that.

Mom walked over to him. She is a small woman, and she had to reach up. She put her hand on his cheek the way she did when he was little.

“Your dad loved you,” she said. “Don’t you forget that.”