For nine Thanksgivings my brother sat me at the card table with his kids, because “she plays in dirt all week.” This year he raised his glass to his $40,000 bonus and told me I’d get a real chair when I got a real job. So I walked out to my truck, came back in, and set an envelope beside his plate.
I dig graves.
I also mow, edge, and replace the sprinkler heads the mowers chew up, and four or five times a month I climb on the backhoe and open the ground for somebody’s mother.
Sixteen years at the same cemetery.
It pays fine. It has a pension.
My brother Marty sells commercial insurance, and he has never once said the word cemetery at a family dinner without making a face like he smelled something.
Mom’s dining table in Kenosha seats eight.
There are nine of us.
So every year somebody eats at the folding card table in the corner by the television, with my nephew Axel and my niece Genesis.
The first year that was me because I came straight from a burial and walked in late.
The second year Marty said, “Might as well keep her where she’s used to sitting.”
After that nobody asked.
The card table has a sticker of a green frog on one leg that Axel put there when he was four. He’s twelve now and pretends it isn’t his.
This year Jordana, Marty’s wife, made place cards.
Mine was on the card table, between a juice box and a paper plate with a cartoon turkey on it.
Mom saw it and said, “Marty, we can pull in the piano bench.”
“She’s fine,” Marty said. “She plays in dirt all week. She can eat with the people who still do.”
Jordana laughed into her wine.
Genesis looked over at me like she was waiting for me to say something back.
I didn’t.
I ate at the card table and cut up Axel’s turkey because the plastic forks kept bending.
Then the toast.
Marty stood at the head of the table, in Dad’s spot, and tapped his glass with a spoon.
“Forty thousand dollar bonus this year,” he said. “I’m not saying I carried the whole region. But I carried the whole region.”
Everybody clapped. I clapped too.
“And to Dad,” he said, and he made his voice go soft for the room. “Who’d be proud that at least ONE of us made something of ourselves.”
He looked straight at the card table when he said ONE.
Then he grinned at me. “Susie. You get a real chair when you get a real job.”
Mom put her fork down.
Here’s what nobody at that table knew.
Dad is buried at my cemetery.
Section 14, row C, under the maple. I mow around him every Tuesday.
When he died three years ago, Marty stood in Mom’s kitchen and said he’d handle the plot and the stone. All of it.
“That’s what the son does,” he said.
Mom held on to him and cried into his shirt.
Two years ago Roderick, who runs our office, waved me into the back and shut the door.
He had Dad’s account up on his screen. Past due. $6,180.
And there was a letter on his desk. Two pages, handwritten, on Marty’s company letterhead.
I’m not going to tell you everything it said.
I’ll tell you the last line.
“Please do not contact my mother about this.”
I paid it that week. Every dollar. It came out of my truck fund, the one I’d been feeding for four years.
I asked Roderick to put the letter back in the file. Then I went back the next morning and asked for it.
It has been in my glovebox ever since, in the office envelope, sealed.
So when Marty said real job, I got up.
“Where are you going?” Jordana said. “Pie’s in ten minutes.”
“My truck,” I said.
It was cold enough that the driveway had a white crust on it. I got the envelope and came back in with my coat still on.
Marty was still standing. Still holding his glass.
I walked past the card table, past Mom, and laid the envelope next to his plate, right by the cranberry.
“What is this,” he said. “A bill?”
He laughed and looked around the table for somebody to laugh with him.
Jordana did.
“Sort of,” I said.
He picked it up and turned it over.
The cemetery’s name was printed in the corner. My cemetery. The word he won’t say at dinner.
“Oh, here we go,” he said. “You selling me a PLOT now, Susie?”
“Open it,” I said.
He didn’t.
He stared at the return address. Then at Roderick’s handwriting on the front, where it said Pohl, P., Section 14.
The color went out of his face in about two seconds.
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS,” he said. Nobody had asked him.
Mom said, “Marty, sit down.”
He stayed standing.
He folded the envelope in half like that would make it smaller and pushed it into the back pocket of his khakis.
“It’s nothing,” he said to Jordana. “It’s her work thing.”
“Then read it out loud,” I said. “You read your bonus out loud.”
Axel had stopped eating.
Genesis had both hands flat on the card table.
Mom stood up. She’s seventy-four, she had a hip replaced in March, and she stood up anyway.
She reached her hand out across the turkey, palm up.
“Marty,” she said. “Give it to me.”
The cranberry
Marty didn’t move.
Mom’s hand stayed out over the turkey. It shook a little, the way it has since the surgery, and she didn’t pull it back.
“Ma,” he said. “It’s junk. It’s a mailer.”
“Then it won’t take long.”
He held out another second. Then he pulled the envelope from his back pocket, creased down the middle now, and put it in her hand the way you hand somebody a parking ticket. He sat down in Dad’s chair.
Mom stayed on her feet.
She tore the end off with her thumb, the way she opens the electric bill, and shook the papers out onto the tablecloth next to the gravy boat.
The top one was the account statement, folded in thirds. She opened it.
I knew what it said. I’d stood in Roderick’s office and read it over his shoulder.
Pohl, P. Section 14, Row C. Balance $0.00. And above that, one payment line. $6,180.00, and the name of the person who made it.
Mom read it twice.
Then she turned around and looked at the card table, at me, still in my coat with my hands in the pockets.
“Susan,” she said. “Why is your name on your father’s grave?”
Mom’s kitchen counter
Mom is the only person alive who calls me Susan. She saves it for when I’m in trouble or when she’s scared.
I didn’t answer her right away. I was thinking about the counter.
The Thursday before Dad’s funeral, I opened his grave myself. Roderick offered to send Vijay out to do it and I said no. I ran the backhoe in the rain and set the vault and squared the corners with a shovel, and when I got to Mom’s that night I still had clay to my knees.
Marty was already there. He’d driven up from his place in Pleasant Prairie with a folder.
He does Mom’s insurance. He has since he got his license. Mom’s kitchen drawer is full of policies he’s sold her, and every one of them she signed at that counter.
She doesn’t sign anything she hasn’t read. Not a birthday card, not a permission slip. She keeps her reading glasses on a beaded chain Genesis made her at day camp, and she puts them on before she picks up a pen.
Marty always says the same thing. “Just sign, Ma. I’ll explain it.”
She never does until she’s read it.
That night she had her checkbook open on the counter. Dad had a small burial policy, one Marty sold him, and the money had come in that week.
“For the plot,” she said. “The stone. All of it. You said you’d handle it.”
“I’ll handle it.”
She wrote the check with her glasses on and tore it out and folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket and patted it. I didn’t see the amount. I was eating saltines out of the sleeve standing up, because I hadn’t had lunch.
Then she went to the hutch and took out the deed. Two spaces. She and Dad bought them in 1994, when I was fourteen, and paid them off over six years.
“Your father’s on the right,” she said. “I’m on his left. The stone already has my name. They just leave the second year off.”
“Ma, don’t talk like that,” Marty said.
It’s true, though. I mow around it every Tuesday. EUGENIA, and her birth year, and a dash, and nothing.
That was three years ago.
Now Mom stood in the dining room with the statement in one hand, and she put her glasses on.
Outside, past the window over the buffet, Marty’s bass boat sat under its blue tarp in Mom’s side yard. His subdivision won’t let him keep it in the driveway, so it winters here. I’d walked past it twice tonight, out to the truck and back.
Mom set the statement down and picked up what was under it.
Two pages in Marty’s handwriting. And a third sheet, cemetery logo at the top, with a yellow plastic flag stuck at the bottom.
The piano bench
“Okay,” Marty said. “I can explain the statement.”
He was still sitting in Dad’s chair. He put both hands flat on the table like a man about to stand up and didn’t stand up.
“I was on a payment plan with them. A plan. That’s normal. She walked in there and paid it over my head, and now she wants credit for it. In front of my kids.”
“She went in your file?” Jordana said.
“She works there,” Marty said. “She went into a private customer file and took a document out of it. You know what that is at my company? That’s termination. That’s walked out by security.”
He pointed his fork at me.
“I’ll call your guy Monday. Rodney.”
“Roderick,” Axel said from the card table.
Everybody looked at Axel. He looked at his plate.
Here’s the part I didn’t think about in the driveway. Roderick could lose his job over that letter. He’d let me read it, and then he’d let me take it. Sixteen years, and I’d never once asked him for anything.
I looked at Jordana. “Can you take the kids in the den for a minute?”
“No,” she said. “They’re fine. You started this. You started it at Thanksgiving, in front of them, so they can sit here and see what you’re like.”
Genesis didn’t move. Axel slid his juice box over so it was touching hers.
Mom wasn’t listening to any of us. She was reading.
She reads slow. She always has. She moves her lips a little on the long words, and she doesn’t skip, and nobody in that family has ever been able to hurry her.
“‘To whom it may concern,'” she said. Out loud. “‘I am writing regarding my father’s account, Pohl, Patrick, Section 14.'”
“Ma. Ma, give me that.”
He reached across the table. She stepped back from it, one step, with the new hip, and held the pages against her cardigan.
“‘I am asking for an extension of ninety days,'” she read. “‘This has been a difficult year for my household. I have had commission chargebacks and a number of obligations I did not foresee.'”
Jordana was looking at Marty now, not at me.
Mom turned the page over to finish the first sheet.
“‘I would also ask you to understand my situation at home. My mother gave me the funds from my father’s burial policy at the time of his death, and she believes this is settled.'”
She stopped there.
The furnace kicked on. Somebody’s phone buzzed in a purse on the coat chair and nobody went to get it.
Mom took her glasses off and let them hang on the chain.
“Nine thousand four hundred dollars,” she said. “I wrote that at my own counter, Martin.”
“I know you did. I know. I was going to put it back.”
“Put it back where?”
He opened his mouth and nothing came out. He’s never in his life not had something come out.
Jordana set her wine glass down so hard the stem rang.
“What nine thousand?” she said.
Mom’s glasses
Marty turned to Jordana. “It was a loan. It was a loan from my mother, it’s family, it’s not a thing.”
“You never told me about any nine thousand dollars.”
“Because it’s not a thing.”
Mom put her glasses back on.
She picked up the third sheet, the one with the yellow flag. She held it close, then farther away, the way she does with the TV Guide.
I hadn’t told anybody what that sheet was. Not Mom, not the guys on the crew. I’d only read it once, standing up in Roderick’s office, and then I’d put it back in the envelope and sealed it, and I’d never opened it again.
It said RELEASE AND REPURCHASE OF INTERMENT RIGHT across the top.
Under that, Section 14, Row C, Space 2.
Owner of record: Eugenia Pohl.
Repurchase credit to be applied to account balance: $3,900.00.
And a blank line at the bottom with the yellow flag pointing at it, and the words SIGN HERE printed on the flag.
Mom didn’t say anything for a long time. She turned the form over to see if there was anything on the back. There wasn’t.
“I’ve seen this,” she said.
Marty said, “No, you haven’t.”
“April,” she said. “The Sunday after Easter. Two years ago. You came with the folder. The bank, the pension, the Social Security. You had me sign all of it at the counter.”
“Ma, I brought you a lot of forms.”
“My glasses were at the place on Sheridan Road. Genesis sat on them at Easter.” She didn’t look at Genesis when she said it. “I signed the ones you read me. This one you didn’t read me. You said, ‘Just sign it, Ma, it’s for the cemetery.’ And I said I’d sign it when I could see it.”
She looked at the form again.
“You never brought it back.”
He never brought it back because that same week I walked into Roderick’s office, and Roderick shut the door, and I paid the balance out of my truck fund. Once there was nothing owed, there was nothing to sell. Roderick pulled the form and put it in the file with the letter.
I hadn’t known about the Sunday after Easter. I’d only known about the form.
Mom set it down flat on the tablecloth, on top of the statement, and smoothed it with her palm.
She went to the second page of the letter and found the line near the bottom. She read it to herself first. Then out loud.
“‘I will have my mother sign the enclosed release along with the other estate papers. It will save everyone a difficult conversation.'”
Then the last line. The one I already told you.
“‘Please do not contact my mother about this.'”
She put her finger on Space 2.
“That’s me,” she said.
The boat
“Okay,” Marty said. “Okay. Everybody sit down. Everybody just calm down for one second.”
Nobody was sitting down. Mom was standing, I was standing, and now Jordana was standing too, with her napkin still in her hand.
“Ma, it’s a buyback. They do it all the time. Ask her, she works there. People sell back spaces every week. And you’d have gone in the mausoleum, it’s indoors, it’s nicer, I priced it, it’s got the glass fronts. You hate the cold. You always say you hate the cold.”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“I had chargebacks that year. Do you know what a chargeback is? A client cancels, they take your commission back. They took eleven thousand back from me in one quarter. I had the house. I had Axel’s braces. I had a lot going on and I was handling it, I was handling all of it, and I was going to put the policy money back before anybody ever had to know, and the space thing was just a bridge. It’s a bridge. I sell risk for a living, Ma. I know what I’m doing with money.”
Jordana said, “The boat was that April.”
He stopped.
“You bought the boat that April,” she said. “Right after Easter. You told me it was a bonus.”
“That was a different bonus.”
“You didn’t get a bonus that year. You just said. Chargebacks.”
He looked at her like she’d come in from another house.
Then he did what he always does when a room turns. He got out his checkbook. He keeps it in his jacket, a real paper checkbook, because he says clients trust a man who writes a check.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. What is it, six? Six-one-eighty.” He was already writing. “There. Susie. Six thousand one hundred and eighty dollars. You get your truck. We’re square. And nobody brings this up again, not at Christmas, not ever, and Ma, you tear that thing up and we eat pie.”
He tore the check out and held it toward me across the table, over the rolls.
I looked at it. It had my name on it, spelled right, Susan.
That money was four years of Fridays. A truck with a heater that works on more than one setting.
“Write it to Mom,” I said.
“What?”
“Nine thousand four hundred. Write it to Mom.”
“I don’t have nine thousand in that account.”
Nobody said anything.
He looked at Mom. She was folding the release form in thirds, slow, and she put it in her cardigan pocket and buttoned the pocket.
“Jordana,” he said. “Get the kids’ coats.”
Jordana didn’t move. Then she sat back down, in her own chair, and picked up her fork.
“We’ll stay for pie,” she said. “Susie can drive us.”
Marty stood there with the check still in his hand. He looked at it, and at the card table, where Axel had his head down and Genesis was watching him with both hands flat.
He put the check on his plate, in the gravy, and went and got his own coat off the chair.
The front door shut. Then the storm door, a second later, the way it always does.
Tuesday
The next Tuesday I picked Mom up at ten.
She rode out in my truck, the same truck, with the crack across the windshield and the heater going full blast because full blast is the only setting it has left. She held her purse in her lap and didn’t complain once.
The mowing’s done for the year by Thanksgiving. Tuesdays in November I blow leaves. The maple in Section 14 drops everything at once, and by noon you can’t see the grass.
I parked on the service road and helped her across.
She’d never been out with me on a workday. In sixteen years.
She stood at the stone and read it. PATRICK. Then EUGENIA, and the year, and the dash. She stood a while.
Marty hasn’t called her. He hasn’t called me either. Roderick asked me Monday morning if there was anything he should know, and I told him all of it, and he said he’d been waiting two years for somebody to ask him for that letter back.
Jordana texted me a picture Sunday night. The card table, folded, leaning against the wall in her garage. The frog was still on the leg.
Mom walked off the stone and onto the grass to the left of it, slow, with her cane, and stood there on her own space with the leaves up past her shoes.
“It’s dirty,” she said.
“It’s leaves. I’ll get them.”
She held her hand out to me, palm up, the same way she did over the turkey.
“Give me the rake,” she said.
If somebody in your family does the work nobody wants to say out loud at dinner, send this one to them.
Family slights can linger for years, whether it’s a father’s careful work at his sister’s fundraiser or a brother signing away more than he should. And for another family story where money and loyalty collide, read what happened after one woman paid for her stepfather’s teeth.
