I’ve weeded Rosalie Hermans’s grave for twenty-two years, so I knew her husband the second I saw him alone in a truck stop booth, pressing a dead hearing aid into his ear. His son had told the cashier, “He wanders. Don’t let him use your phone,” and driven off. I had a battery in my pocket and a promise I’d kept since 2013.
Everett is eighty-six and still lives alone on the quarter section he and Rosalie bought in 1968.
His son has wanted it sold since the week she went in the ground.
I’d only stopped for diesel and a bag of ice on the way back from picking up mower blades in Norfolk.
He was in the corner booth under the TV, in the brown cardigan he wears every Memorial Day.
A sandwich bag of pill bottles sat next to a coffee gone cold enough to grow a film.
I said his name twice.
He didn’t turn.
The cashier came around the counter before I got any closer, a girl of maybe twenty-four with Ashanti on her name tag and a pen behind each ear.
“Ma’am, I wouldn’t,” she said. “His son said he wanders and tells people stories. They’re coming back for him at four.”
It was twenty to seven.
I looked at the clock over the hot dog rollers and then at her, and she looked at the mop bucket.
“How long has he been sitting there?” I said.
“Since about three-thirty.” She pulled one of the pens out and clicked it. “He keeps asking for the phone. His son said DON’T GIVE HIM THE PHONE, he’ll call 911 and tell them he’s been kidnapped.”
Everett had his right hand cupped over his ear.
The aid was the little tan kind that sits behind, and he kept pressing the battery door shut with his thumbnail like that would wake it up.
I know that move.
I’ve cut grass in cemeteries since I was thirty-seven, and I’ve worn two of those since I was fifty-one.
I keep a card of batteries in my shirt pocket, the ones with the brown tabs, because a dead aid at the far end of section nine means I don’t hear the backhoe coming.
I slid into the booth across from him.
He looked up and his whole face moved.
“Carolyn,” he said, way too loud.
Both truckers at the counter turned around on their stools.
I held out my hand and he put the aid in it like I’d asked him for a quarter.
I thumbed the door open, dropped the dead battery on a napkin, peeled the tab off a fresh one and counted to five so it could wake up, the way my audiologist taught me.
Then I put it back in his palm.
His fingers shook getting it behind his ear.
“Say something,” he said.
“You’re in a truck stop, Everett.”
He shut his eyes.
“Seven days,” he said. “I’ve been DEAF for SEVEN DAYS.”
“Where are your spares?”
“Gretchen took them a week ago Sunday. Said she’d put them somewhere safe. This one quit that Tuesday.”
Gretchen is Phillip’s wife.
She calls him Pop in front of people.
“They had a folder on the back seat,” he said. “She kept turning around and putting a pen in my hand. I couldn’t hear a word, but I can read big letters.”
“What did the letters say?”
“Durable power of attorney.” He tore the corner off a sugar packet and didn’t pour it. “I wouldn’t sign it in a car. Rosalie never let me sign anything in a car.”
So they walked him in, sat him down, bought him a coffee and drove away.
“Phillip leaned over that counter and told that girl something,” Everett said. “I watched his mouth. Couldn’t get it.”
Ashanti was standing at my shoulder.
She’d heard every word of it back then.
“He said it like he was ashamed of him,” she said.
I had Phillip’s number because he’s the one who gets the bill for perpetual care, and he’s late with it every March.
I put it on speaker. My own ears are no good with a phone pressed against them.
He answered on the fourth ring.
I could hear a turn signal ticking.
“This is Carolyn, from the cemetery,” I said. “I’m sitting with your dad.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Phillip said. “Did he call you? He’s not supposed to have a phone.”
“He’s got his hearing back, Phillip.”
The line went quiet.
The ticking stopped.
“Did he say anything to you?”
That was his first question.
Not whether his father had eaten.
“He said you left him here at three-thirty.”
“We were coming BACK for him. Gretchen’s got a migraine, we had to get her home, it’s an hour each way. Just LEAVE HIM WHERE HE IS and we’ll be there when we can.”
Then he said my name the way people do right before they ask for a favor.
“Carolyn. Has Dad been out to Mom’s grave much? On his own?”
“Every Sunday till they took his license,” I said.
“Gretchen thinks he’s put something out there. She wants Mom’s bench moved to the new section before the ground freezes. I already paid. Your office said Thursday.”
I had seen that work order on Friday.
The top line said HERMANS, RELOCATE BENCH.
I’d set my coffee on it and never looked at it again.
Everett put his hand flat on my wrist.
He had heard all of it.
In October of 2013 he sat on that bench in his church shoes, told me one thing, and made me shake on it.
I have never said it out loud.
He leaned in so the truckers couldn’t hear.
“Did you ever tell anybody?” he said.
“No.”
“Not even Lowell?”
“Not even Lowell.”
Then Ashanti tapped the counter glass with her pen.
“Ma’am,” she said. “That’s them.”
A silver SUV was rolling in under the pump canopy, slow, with its blinker still going.
An hour each way.
Gretchen was out before it stopped, a blue folder under her arm.
Everett’s grip on my wrist went tight enough to hurt.
“NOT ONE WORD,” he said. “Not even now.”
Gretchen pushed the glass door open with her hip and smiled at me like I worked there.
Twenty to seven
“You must be Carolyn,” she said. “From the cemetery. Phillip said you’d called.”
She set the blue folder on the table between the sugar packets and kissed the top of Everett’s head.
“Pop. There you are. Did you wander off on this nice lady?”
He didn’t answer her. He looked at me.
Gretchen is fifty-seven and wears her reading glasses on a beaded chain. She slid in on his side of the booth, so he had the black window on one hand and her on the other.
I took the card of batteries out of my shirt pocket. Five slots left. I laid it face down by his coffee, where she’d have to reach across him to get it.
She saw it anyway.
“Oh, good, you found one,” she said. “I’ve been all over that house looking for his.”
“They’re somewhere safe,” Everett said.
She laughed like he’d told a joke at a funeral lunch.
Then she twisted around in the booth until she found Ashanti.
“Sweetie, did he try for the phone again?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Good,” Gretchen said. “Write that down too.”
Section four
The bench went in on a Tuesday in October of 2013, nine years after Rosalie did.
I’d set her myself, in 2004. She was cremated, and the urn went into a concrete vault about the size of a bread box. I carried it from the hearse with one arm. I remember thinking it was the lightest one I’d ever carried, and then thinking she’d been a small woman.
Phillip had wanted her in town. He said so at the funeral home, loud enough for the next family over. “Mom’s not going in some field.”
Everett let him have that one.
The bench came nine years later. He paid cash at the office and asked for me to pour the pad. I set the footing at the head of her plot and bolted the bench down on four studs, gray granite, ROSALIE across the back in letters you can read from the road.
He sat on it while the concrete was still green. Church shoes, the brown cardigan. He told me one thing, and put out his hand, and I shook it.
After that he came every Sunday. He’d sit about an hour and leave a cottonwood leaf on the seat, flat, like a bookmark.
There’s not one cottonwood in our cemetery. I swept those leaves off every Monday for years and never asked.
The lot’s in his name. Thao in the office won’t let me put a shovel in the ground until she’s held the work order up against the lot card and checked the signature. Owner signs. Nobody else.
Gretchen brings the office a pecan pie every Christmas, with a card from Phillip, Gretchen and Pop.
Moving a bench means I take a jackhammer to the footing I poured.
The bell over the glass door went, and Phillip came in wiping his hands on his jeans.
He didn’t look at his father first. He looked at me.
The yellow tabs
Phillip is fifty-nine and got Rosalie’s chin and none of the rest of her. He stood at the end of the booth with his keys still in his hand.
“Thanks for sitting with him, Carolyn,” he said. “You didn’t have to.”
“He’d been sitting three hours.”
“He likes it here. They’ve got pie.”
Nobody had brought Everett any pie.
Gretchen opened the folder. The power of attorney was on top, flagged with yellow tabs in three places. She turned it to face him and laid her own pen across it.
“Pop, now you can hear, I’ll go slow,” she said. “This just lets Phillip help with the bills and the doctors. That’s all it is. And Carolyn isn’t family, so she can witness. That’s lucky, really. We were going to have to find somebody at the bank.”
“I’m not witnessing anything,” I said.
“It’s just your name, hon.”
Everett had his hands flat on his knees under the table. He didn’t touch the pen.
“Dad,” Phillip said. “It’s getting dark. Gretchen’s head is killing her.”
Gretchen didn’t look like her head hurt. She looked like a woman at the DMV whose number had just come up.
So I tried the easy thing.
“I go right past your place,” I said. “I’ll run him home. You two get her to bed.”
For a second Phillip’s face went loose, like he might take it.
Gretchen put her hand on his arm.
“You can’t take him anywhere,” she said. “You’re not family. And he has a history, Carolyn. You put him in your truck, he gets on your phone and tells the sheriff he’s been kidnapped, and then who’s that going to fall on? You?”
“He’s not going to call anybody.”
“He walked into the pharmacy Wednesday and told the girl his son stole his ears.”
“Wasn’t him,” Everett said.
Phillip looked up at the TV.
Gretchen slid a single typed page out from under the power of attorney and held it out over the back of the booth.
“Ashanti, sweetie,” she said. “This is what we talked about at three-thirty. Just your name at the bottom.”
Four p.m.
Ashanti didn’t take it. She held it by one corner like a wet receipt, and I reached up and took it out of her fingers before Gretchen could.
It was typed. A home printer, the ink going pale down the right side.
On Tuesday afternoon at approximately 4:00 p.m. I observed Mr. Everett Hermans in a confused state. He did not respond when spoken to. He repeatedly tried to use the store telephone and stated that he had been kidnapped by his family. His son had informed me that he is prone to wandering.
Four o’clock.
At four o’clock they were supposed to be back. Ashanti told me so herself.
There’s no printer in a silver SUV. Somebody typed that page at a kitchen table this morning, before anybody had left him anywhere, and wrote down how he’d act when he couldn’t hear. Did not respond when spoken to. Gretchen took his spares a week ago Sunday. She knew how long a tan behind-the-ear battery lasts.
I know it too. I buy them by the card.
“There’s two pages,” Ashanti said.
There were. The second was stapled behind, and I didn’t need to read the heading. I’ve carried that form across section nine a hundred times. Request to Open Vault.
Lot owner: Everett Hermans. Section 4. A signature line, blank, with or agent under power of attorney typed under it.
Requested by: Gretchen Hermans.
Reason: Family wishes to confirm contents prior to relocation.
Date of work: Thursday, 9:00 a.m.
“You’re opening her,” I said.
“Just to look,” Phillip said. “Gretchen thinks…”
“Pop went out there every Sunday for years like it was a bank,” Gretchen said. “If there’s a will in that box, it’s Phillip’s business. He’s the only child.”
Everett’s hand came back onto my wrist.
At the bottom of the form was the cemetery witness line. Thao fills that in herself, off the schedule.
My name was already typed on it.
Cottonwood
“So what’s in it, Pop?” Gretchen said.
Everett didn’t answer.
“We’ll find out Thursday either way. You can make this easy.”
I picked the card of batteries up off the table. I wanted it on him, not lying there for her to put somewhere safe. I pulled his cardigan pocket open to drop it in.
My fingers found something dry.
A cottonwood leaf. Brown, pressed flat from riding in there, the stem broken off short.
I laid it on top of the form, right on the word Vault.
Everett put his hand over it.
Phillip looked at that leaf the way you look at somebody you went to school with and can’t name.
Here’s what Everett told me on the bench in October of 2013, with the concrete still green under his shoes.
“She isn’t in there, Carolyn.”
That was the one thing.
The rest was why. Rosalie wanted to go under the cottonwood she planted behind the house the spring they bought the place. She asked him in the hospital, twice. Phillip wanted a stone in town where people could see it, and he wouldn’t let it go, so Everett gave him a stone. He put her under the tree himself. The box I carried from the hearse with one arm was dirt from her garden.
“If they sell the place, she goes with it,” he said. “Anybody opens that box, Phillip knows where she is, and he’ll have her dug up and sell it. You don’t let anybody open it.”
I shook on it. I never asked him one more thing about it.
Now Gretchen tapped Thursday with her fingernail.
“Nine o’clock,” she said. “It’s paid for. And it’s your name, Carolyn.”
I reached up and took the pen from behind Ashanti’s ear.
The back of page one
I turned Gretchen’s typed page over and pushed it across to Everett, blank side up.
“What are you doing?” Gretchen said.
I wrote it in block letters, big, the way he said he could read. I said each line out loud as I went, so the truckers got it too.
I AM EVERETT HERMANS. I OWN THE HERMANS LOT IN SECTION 4. I CAN HEAR TODAY. MY SON LEFT ME HERE AT 3:30. I DO NOT AGREE TO OPEN MY WIFE’S VAULT OR MOVE HER BENCH. I AM NOT SIGNING ANYTHING ELSE TODAY.
“That isn’t legal,” Gretchen said. “Phillip, tell her. That’s the back of a piece of paper. He sat here three hours begging strangers for a phone. A man in his condition can’t sign things in a truck stop, that’s what the folder is for, that’s the whole point of the folder.”
Everett read it twice.
“This isn’t a car,” he said.
He signed it. His hand shook on the E and steadied on the rest.
I signed under him, my whole name, and wrote groundskeeper after it, because that’s what I am.
Ashanti held out her hand for the pen.
“You don’t have to do that, sweetie,” Gretchen said.
Ashanti signed. Then she reached in her apron, took out two twenties folded the long way, and laid them on the power of attorney.
“He gave me forty to keep him off the phone,” she said.
“That was for his coffee.”
“Coffee’s a dollar nine.”
Gretchen had her phone out. She found the number fast, like she’d used it this week, and set it on speaker next to the leaf.
Thao answered from her kitchen. I could hear a dishwasher.
“Thao, it’s Gretchen Hermans. Your groundskeeper is out here in a truck stop putting words in a confused old man’s mouth and getting him to sign them against his own family.”
“Is Mr. Hermans there?”
Everett leaned over the phone. “THIS IS EVERETT,” he said. “I CAN HEAR YOU FINE.”
“Did you sign something, Everett?”
“I did. At a table.”
Thao didn’t say anything for a second. The dishwasher kept going.
“Lot owner’s the lot owner, Gretchen. Nobody opens anything Thursday. I’ll refund Phillip.”
“And her? She signed it. She works for you.”
“Carolyn, is your name on that?”
“Yes.”
“You know staff don’t sign for a lot family. Come see me before you clock in.”
Gretchen hung up. She put the power of attorney back in the folder with the yellow tabs sticking out. The twenties stayed where they were.
“You’ll die out there by yourself, Pop,” she said. “And it’ll be Phillip that finds you. Not her.”
“I’ll pay my own care bill from now on,” Everett said to Phillip. “Don’t you worry about March.”
Gretchen went out first. Phillip held the door for her, and then he let it go.
The blinker was still going when they pulled out.
“Get your pills, Everett,” I said.
Sunday
Lowell drops me at the cemetery gate on Sundays now. He asks how Everett’s doing and never what we talk about.
I turned my keys in to Thao that Wednesday. She said if I took my name off that paper she’d forget the whole thing. I told her I’d signed my name the same way for twenty-six years and I’d like to keep doing it. She let me hang up the backhoe key myself.
Jamal does section nine now. I can hear him from Rosalie’s plot.
I weed her grave on my knees in my own jeans. The bench is still on its four bolts, the footing I poured is still under it, and there’s a cottonwood leaf on the seat.
Everett sits at the far end in the brown cardigan, buttoned one hole off.
This morning he had his aid out before I got my gloves off.
“It’s chirping,” he said.
I peeled the tab off a fresh one and counted to five.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still drives out to a grave on Sundays.
For more stories about keeping faith with the people who need you, read the senator who called them trash on the hill that killed Erik and the husband who filled every cup in his mother’s kitchen. And for another promise that refuses to fade, there’s the hoodie bought for Brooke that Christmas.
