At my grandpa’s funeral lunch, my cousins told his widow of twenty-six years that the double plot he paid $3,100 for belonged to their mother now, and that she could “go lie by the fence with the strangers.” Then the old groundskeeper nobody had offered a plate set a photograph on the table with one face cut out.
Linda was holding a paper plate with two deviled eggs on it when Brittany said it, and she didn’t put the plate down.
Grandpa had been in the ground for about ninety minutes.
We were in the parish hall in Kenosha, the one with the folding tables and the clock that’s run eleven minutes fast since I was in confirmation class.
Aunt Marcy sat at the head of our table like she’d booked the room.
Her kids sat on either side of her.
Brittany, thirty-six, sunglasses still on her head indoors. Garrett, thirty-nine, with the cemetery’s paperwork folded in his suit pocket.
“We talked to the office Friday,” Garrett said. “Mom’s taking the spot next to Grandpa.”
“That spot is Linda’s,” I said. “He bought both of them. Her name’s on it.”
“He bought them in 2004,” Brittany said. “People change their minds when they’re dying.”
He didn’t, though.
I drove up every Sunday of the last eleven months. Linda was there every single day.
She was the one who learned to flush his port. She slept in the recliner next to the hospital bed the whole winter.
Marcy came twice. Once at Thanksgiving, and once to ask who was getting the boat.
“There’s a nice open row by the back fence,” Garrett said. “Shade. Quiet. We’d cover the difference.”
“By the fence,” Linda said.
It was the first thing she’d said all lunch.
“With the strangers,” Brittany said, and she smiled when she said it. “You’ll fit right in.”
I put my fork down so hard it bounced.
“She was married to him for TWENTY-SIX YEARS.”
“And I’m his DAUGHTER,” Marcy said. “I’m blood. She was the second try.”
Linda set the plate down then.
She lined it up with the edge of the table like that mattered.
Nobody at the next table was pretending to eat anymore.
That’s when Sergio came over.
Sergio Marquez has kept the grounds at that cemetery since before I was born. He’d dug Grandpa’s grave that morning and stood at the back of the service in his green work jacket with his cap in both hands.
Nobody had offered him a plate. Linda had, earlier. He’d said no thank you.
Now he had a manila envelope with the cemetery’s address printed in the corner.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Roy asked me to do something if this ever came up.”
“If what came up?” Garrett said.
“This,” Sergio said.
He slid an old photograph out of the envelope and laid it face up on the tablecloth, right between Marcy’s coffee and Linda’s plate.
A Christmas picture.
The brown couch. The tree with too much tinsel. The year printed in orange on the white border, 1986.
Grandpa, young, with a mustache. My grandmother, a year before she left him. My dad at fifteen in a Bears sweatshirt.
And a fourth person on the end of the couch.
Except there was no face.
Somebody had taken scissors to it. A small clean square where the head should have been, cut so carefully the edges were straight.
Brittany pushed her sunglasses up higher. “What the hell is that.”
“Roy brought it to my office in 2011,” Sergio said. “The day he paid off the second plot. He said if his kids ever came after Linda’s ground, I was to set this on the table and ask one question.”
“Okay, this is insane,” Garrett said. “Mom, he DIGS HOLES for a living. Why is he even in here?”
Marcy wasn’t looking at Garrett.
She was looking at the square.
Her hand had gone up to the collar of her blouse and stayed there.
“Who’s on the end?” Brittany said. “Mom. Who is that?”
“Put that away,” Marcy said.
It came out small. Nothing like the voice she’d used on Linda.
Then louder. “PUT IT AWAY, SERGIO.”
“I gave him my word,” Sergio said.
Garrett stood up and his chair screeched on the tile. “You don’t get to walk in here with some creepy arts and crafts project and—”
“Sit down, Garrett,” Linda said.
He sat down.
In thirty years I have never seen Garrett Brandt do what anybody told him.
Linda wasn’t looking at any of them. She was looking at the photograph.
She didn’t look surprised.
That scared me worse than the hole.
She knew.
Whatever used to be in that square, she’d known it the whole time, and she’d still made deviled eggs for these people.
“Linda,” I said. “What is he talking about?”
She didn’t answer me.
Sergio put one finger on the white border, right under the hole.
“Roy told me who used to sit in that spot, Marcy,” he said. “And what she did in the spring of 1990 that sent him for the scissors.”
The hall was quiet enough to hear the coffee urn tick.
Marcy said, “Don’t.”
Sergio turned the photograph over.
There were three lines on the back in Grandpa’s blocky handwriting, blue ballpoint, pressed so hard the paper had puckered.
He cleared his throat and started reading them out loud.
Three lines in blue ballpoint
He read them flat, the way you’d read off a work order.
“That was Marcy.”
He moved his finger down one line.
“April 1990 she put her mother in the back row with no stone and kept the insurance.”
One more.
“Sergio, ask her who paid for the stone.”
All three lines were in capitals. Grandpa printed everything in capitals. Grocery lists, birthday cards, the notes he left on the boat about the bilge pump.
Sergio laid the picture down with the writing still up and looked at my aunt.
“So I’m asking, Marcy,” he said. “Who paid for your mother’s stone?”
Marcy didn’t answer.
Her hand stayed at her collar. The other one was flat on the table next to her coffee, and I could see her wedding ring pressing a dent into the tablecloth.
I reached over and turned the photograph face up again.
I don’t know why. I wanted to look at the square now that I knew whose head had been in it.
There was a girl’s lap under the hole. Folded hands. A class ring. Acid-washed jeans and white socks with no shoes, because Grandpa never let anybody wear shoes on that couch.
Marcy would have been eighteen.
My grandmother was sitting right next to her in the picture. Dark hair, a red sweater, laughing at something off to the side.
I never met her. I didn’t even know what she looked like until that second.
My dad told me once that his mother died before I was born. He said it in the car, looking at the road, and the way he said it meant that was the end of it.
I was nine. I never asked again. I never asked where she was.
“The back row,” I said. “What back row?”
“Out there,” Sergio said. He tipped his head at the wall, at the windows, at the cemetery across the parking lot. “By the fence.”
Linda picked up her napkin and folded it in half.
Then in half again.
Brittany was looking from Sergio to her mother and back, and her mouth was open a little, like she was waiting for the joke.
“No,” Brittany said. “Grandma Cheryl’s in Arizona.”
Nobody said anything.
“Mom? You told us she was in Arizona.”
Two bunches of carnations
Here’s what I knew about Linda before that lunch.
She married my grandpa at the VFW hall in the summer of 2000. I was four. I wore a yellow dress and threw rose petals at the wrong people.
Marcy wore black to the wedding. I didn’t understand that until I was in high school and saw the pictures.
Linda ran the attendance office at the high school for twenty-two years. She signed every tardy slip in that building. Garrett got called down to her window about twice a week the whole time he was there.
That’s why he sat down. He’s been sitting down for Linda since he was fourteen.
She and Grandpa had the little ranch house on the north side, with the boat on a trailer in the driveway under a blue tarp.
It was a seventeen-foot aluminum boat. Grandpa took Brittany and me out on it every summer when we were kids, before Brittany got too old for me. She was the one who taught me to back the trailer down the ramp.
Grandpa got the diagnosis in January.
By February he was in the hospital bed in the living room, and Linda was in the recliner next to it.
I worked it out with my boss so I could drive up every Sunday. Ninety minutes each way. I’d get there around ten, and Linda would just be back from the eight o’clock Mass.
She always had two bunches of carnations from the Pick ‘n Save.
One bunch went in the vase on the TV tray next to Grandpa’s bed. The other one stayed in her car.
Every week. Pink and white, the cheap ones in the cellophane.
Around April I asked her about it.
“Who’s the other bunch for?”
“A friend,” Linda said. “From a long time ago.”
I figured it was somebody from church. Somebody in a nursing home. I didn’t think about it again.
The other thing I knew was my birthday card.
Every March since I was ten, Grandpa sent me a card with a check for thirty dollars. Never twenty-five, never fifty. Thirty, with the memo line filled in. BIRTHDAY.
He printed his name on the signature line in the same capitals he used for everything. ROY PAWLAK. Like a man filling out a form at the DMV.
The card this past March came two days late. The letters on the envelope wobbled.
I never cashed that check. I put it in my wallet behind my license, and it was still there, folded once, on the day of the funeral.
By summer he couldn’t do the crossword anymore. By fall he couldn’t hold a fork.
Linda fed him with a baby spoon she bought at Walgreens. She’d cut the pancakes into little squares.
Marcy called sometimes. Not to talk to him. To ask Linda things.
Was the house paid off. Was there a will. Who was getting the boat.
That was her second visit, in August. She stood in the driveway and looked at the boat under the tarp for a long time and didn’t come in.
Her first visit was Thanksgiving.
I was there for that one. Linda made a turkey breast because nobody could eat a whole bird, and I brought a pie from the Kwik Trip because I’m not a person who makes pies.
Marcy came in around two with a green folder under her arm.
She kissed Grandpa on the forehead. Then she turned to Linda and said, “Would you mind running out for cranberry sauce? The kind in the can. Dad always liked the can.”
Linda looked at her for a second.
Then she got her coat.
“Give me ten minutes alone with my dad,” Marcy said to me. “Go help her.”
I went. I’m not proud of it. I sat in Linda’s car in the Pick ‘n Save lot while she bought a can of cranberry sauce nobody opened.
When we got back, Marcy was already in the driveway with the green folder under her arm.
She didn’t say goodbye to him. She didn’t stay for the turkey.
Grandpa was asleep in the bed with his mouth open. Linda checked his pulse with two fingers on his wrist, the way the hospice nurse showed her.
Nine days later he died at a quarter after four in the morning, with Linda holding his hand.
That night Marcy put a picture on Facebook. Her on Grandpa’s shoulders at the lake, maybe six years old. Daddy’s girl forever. Two hundred and fourteen comments. People telling her how strong she was.
I read all of them in my car outside the funeral home.
So that was the family. That was what I thought I knew, sitting in the parish hall with Grandpa’s handwriting face up on the tablecloth.
Marcy took her hand down off her collar.
She picked up her coffee and drank some of it, like she had all the time in the world.
Garrett was already reaching into his suit pocket.
Arizona
“My mother is in Arizona,” Marcy said.
She put the cup down.
“Phoenix. She went out to her sister’s after she left Dad, and she died out there, and that’s where she’s buried. I don’t know what this man thinks he’s doing.”
“Mom,” Brittany said. “It says—”
“I know what it says. I can read.” Marcy turned to Sergio. “You’re a groundskeeper. You cut grass. My father was a sick old man with a grudge and a pair of scissors, and you’re standing in a church hall reading his garbage out loud at his own funeral.”
“He wasn’t sick in 2011,” Sergio said.
“He was sick in the head.”
Sergio didn’t argue. He just stood there with his cap in one hand.
“Okay,” Garrett said. “Okay. We’re all upset.”
He unfolded the paper from his pocket and smoothed it out on the table, right on top of the photograph, so the picture was half covered.
“This is a stunt,” he said. “And I get it, Linda, I do. You’re emotional. But this is a legal document, and that,” he flicked the corner of the photo, “is a craft project.”
I leaned over to read it.
It was a form from the parish cemetery office. TRANSFER OF INTERMENT RIGHTS. Section C, Lot 14, Space 2.
Space 2 was Linda’s.
From: Roy Pawlak. To: Marcy Brandt.
At the bottom there was a signature line. Roy Pawlak, in black ink.
And a date.
November 27.
Thanksgiving.
Up in the corner somebody had stamped it RECEIVED, with Friday’s date, and written initials in blue pen next to the stamp.
“The office already took it,” Garrett said. “Delaney put it through on Friday. Grandpa paid for both spaces. He had every right to give one to his daughter, and he did. It’s done.”
“Then why are you showing it to her?” I said.
“Because it’s cleaner if everybody’s on the same page.” He pointed at a box near the bottom. “Co-owner acknowledgment. She initials it, nobody gets a lawyer, nobody drags this out. We cover the difference on the fence plot. Everybody gets to grieve.”
Brittany had her phone out.
I don’t know when she took it out. It was up at chest height, pointed at Linda, and the red dot was on.
“I’m just making sure there’s a record,” Brittany said. “Since apparently people bring pictures to lunch now.”
Linda looked at the form for a long time.
She looked at the date.
I knew she was doing what I was doing. Counting back. The cranberry sauce. The green folder. The ten minutes.
He couldn’t hold a fork on Thanksgiving.
I’d watched her feed him the pie.
“Linda,” Marcy said. Her voice was nice now. Church voice. “Nobody’s trying to hurt you. You had him for twenty-six years. You got the house. You’ll get the boat, I’m sure, and his pension, and his Social Security. All I want is to be next to my father. One space. Is that so much?”
“He never gave you that space,” I said.
“You weren’t there,” Marcy said. “You were at the store.”
Garrett took a pen out of his inside pocket. A heavy silver one, from his work.
He clicked it and set it down on the form, right next to the box.
“Initial by the X, Linda,” he said. “Then everybody can go home.”
The side door
I grabbed the form.
I didn’t plan it. My hand was just on it, and then it was in two pieces, and then four.
The pieces fell on Linda’s plate, on the deviled eggs.
For a second it was the best I’d felt all day.
Then Garrett laughed.
“That’s a copy,” he said. “You think I’d bring the original to a potluck? The original’s in Delaney’s drawer. Has been since Friday.”
“Got it,” Brittany said.
She turned the phone so I could see the screen. Me, ripping the paper. My face looked like somebody I wouldn’t want to sit next to on a bus.
“Destroying documents at a funeral,” Brittany said. “Very classy, cuz.”
“Brittany,” I said. “Look at the date on it.”
“I don’t care about the date.”
“He couldn’t hold a fork on Thanksgiving.”
“So Mom helped him,” Brittany said. “That’s what daughters do. You’d know that if you’d ever been anybody’s daughter for more than two hours on a Sunday.”
That one landed. She knew it would. She’d known me since I was born.
The man at the next table, one of Grandpa’s old friends from the Legion, got up and took his wife’s coat off the back of her chair and they left.
Two more people followed them.
Somebody’s little kid at the far end of the hall was still eating Jell-O, and nobody was stopping him.
Marcy smiled at me. It was the first real smile I’d seen on her all day.
“You see?” she said to Linda. “This is what you raised. Two Sundays a month and she thinks she’s family.”
“Every Sunday,” I said.
“Oh, every Sunday. Give her a medal.”
I looked at Sergio. He was the only one in the room who hadn’t moved.
“Can you call the office?” I said. “Can you tell them it’s not right?”
“I dig,” Sergio said. “The office does the paper. They don’t ask me.”
“But you know.”
“I know what Roy told me,” he said. “And I know what I did in April 1990. That’s all I know.”
“What did you do?”
He turned his cap around once in his hands.
“I dug it,” he said. “Back row. Section K, by the chain-link. The row the parish sells cheap, to families that can’t. Three hundred and forty dollars.”
He looked at Marcy.
“Nobody came but her and a man from the funeral home. Fifteen minutes. No priest. She didn’t put a name on it. Just the number on a metal stake.”
“That’s a lie,” Marcy said.
“I saw the name on the paperwork. Pawlak. Roy’s mother and father are in the front section, I knew him from mowing around them. So I called him.”
“He didn’t know?” I said.
“He didn’t know she was dead,” Sergio said. “Nobody called him. Nobody called your dad either.”
I felt that in my stomach. My dad was nineteen that spring.
“Your father came out every year after that,” Sergio said to me. “March ninth, her birthday. Every year, till the year he got sick. Stood out there maybe twenty minutes and went home.”
My dad is buried in the front section, next to his grandparents.
I’ve stood at his stone probably fifty times since he died. I never once walked to the back.
Forty yards. Maybe less.
He knew where she was the whole time. He stood out there every March. And he never told me.
“This is ridiculous,” Garrett said. “Mom. Tell him.”
“I told him,” Marcy said. “Arizona.”
Linda pushed her chair back.
She stood up slowly, the way she’d been standing up since about August, one hand on the table.
She took her good wool coat off the back of the chair and put it on and buttoned every button, all the way to the top.
Then she looked at me.
“Bring the picture,” Linda said, and she walked out the side door.
Section K, by the chain-link
It had snowed on Wednesday, and nobody had shoveled the path past the front section.
Linda went straight to her car first. It was parked by the hall’s side door, a gray Malibu with a dent in the back bumper from a shopping cart.
She popped the trunk.
There was a bunch of carnations lying in it, pink and white, in the cellophane from the Pick ‘n Save.
She’d bought them that morning. On the day of her husband’s funeral, she’d gone to the store and bought the second bunch.
She tucked them inside her coat and started walking.
Sergio walked with us. He didn’t say anything. He went a little ahead and kicked the snow off the path where it was deep.
We went past the front section. Past the Pawlak stones. Grandpa’s parents. My dad, BELOVED SON AND FATHER, with the little frozen flag I’d stuck in the ground in May.
Past Grandpa, under the green tarp, with the folding chairs still stacked by the tree.
Linda didn’t stop there. She’d stop there later. I could tell by how she didn’t look.
The rows got closer together toward the back. The stones got smaller. Then there weren’t really stones at all, just flat markers in the grass, some of them so low the snow covered them completely.
There was a chain-link fence at the end, and past it the back of a muffler shop.
Linda stopped at the fourth marker from the fence.
She got down on one knee in the snow in her good wool coat and brushed it off with her glove.
Gray granite. Flat to the ground.
CHERYL ANN PAWLAK
1948 – 1990
MOTHER OF MARCY AND JOHN
There was a coffee can sunk into the dirt next to it, the old kind with the tin lid. In it were last Sunday’s carnations, frozen stiff, pink and white.
Linda pulled them out and laid them in the snow. She took the new ones out of her coat and pushed them down into the can.
She straightened the stems so they all stood up the same way.
“It was a number on a stake for eleven years,” she said. “Roy told me about her before he ever asked me to marry him. He said I should know what kind of family I was walking into.”
“You paid for this,” I said.
“Eleven hundred and eighty dollars. In 2001. I took it out of my school check over a year.” She brushed a little more snow off the edge. “Roy offered. I said no. It’s not the kind of thing you let the husband pay for. Not this one.”
“Why?”
She thought about it.
“Because somebody should do it who didn’t have to,” she said.
Sergio was standing behind us with his hands in his jacket pockets.
“Every Sunday since,” he said. “She’s never missed one. Not even in the snow. I plow back here for her.”
“And Marcy?”
“Never,” Sergio said. “Not one time in thirty-six years.”
I looked at the words on the stone again. MOTHER OF MARCY AND JOHN.
“You put Marcy’s name on it,” I said.
“It’s true,” Linda said. “Whatever else.”
I asked her about the insurance. She told me what Roy had told her. Cheryl had worked in the cafeteria at the Chrysler engine plant. There was a policy through work, ten thousand dollars, and Marcy was the one on it.
The house Garrett and Brittany grew up in, the one on Twenty-Second Avenue with the above-ground pool, Marcy bought it that summer.
Ten thousand dollars. Three hundred and forty for the grave. No stone.
“Roy went to her,” Linda said. “When Sergio called him. He went to her house and asked her why. She told him her mother walked out on the family, and she didn’t owe her a stone. And she had a baby coming and a husband who was already gone half the time. She said it was her money, and it was, legally. That’s when he went home and got the scissors.”
“But he still came to Christmas,” I said. “All those years. He still came to her house.”
“For the grandkids,” Linda said. “He let her back in for Christmas. He never let her back in the picture.”
I took the photograph out of my coat. The square was still a square.
Sergio stepped up beside me and pointed with his chin. Past Cheryl’s marker, two spaces down, there was a stretch of snow with no markers under it. Flat and open, right along the fence.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the nice open row.”
I didn’t understand for a second.
Then I did.
Garrett had picked it off the office map. Shade. Quiet. The open row by the back fence.
Two spaces from Marcy’s mother.
“Does she know?” I said. “Does Marcy know that’s where they put her?”
“I don’t know what Marcy knows,” Linda said.
She stood up. It took her two tries. I held her elbow.
There was snow on the knee of her good coat, and she didn’t brush it off.
“I’ll tell you something, honey,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind it out here. I wouldn’t. Somebody ought to be next to her.”
“No,” I said. “Linda. No.”
“I’m seventy-one years old. I’m tired. And it’s ground. It’s just ground.”
I couldn’t say anything. My throat wouldn’t do it.
She looked back across the cemetery toward the front section, toward the green tarp and the folding chairs.
She looked at it for a long time.
“But your grandpa didn’t want me out here,” Linda said. “He wrote it on a picture.”
She took the photograph out of my hand and put it inside her coat, where the flowers had been.
“That’s the only reason I’m going back in there.”
Thirty dollars, March
They were all still at the table.
Most of the hall had cleared out. The Legion guys were gone. The ladies from the funeral committee were pretending to wrap up the ham in the kitchen with the door open.
The clock over the stage said 2:51. It was really 2:40.
Marcy had her coat on, but she hadn’t left. Garrett had the pieces of the copy stacked in a neat pile next to his plate. Brittany still had her phone out.
Linda sat down in the same chair.
She picked up the silver pen.
“Thank God,” Garrett said. “Okay. Right there by the X.”
“Wait,” I said.
I took out my wallet. I slid the check out from behind my license and unfolded it and laid it on the table, next to the pieces of the copy, where the signature line showed.
ROY PAWLAK.
Printed. Capital letters, pressed hard, the R a little crooked.
Then I turned over the copy pieces until I found the bottom quarter, the one with the signature.
Roy Pawlak.
Cursive. A big loop on the R. A long slanted tail on the k. Pretty, almost. Like something out of a penmanship workbook.
“He printed,” I said. “He never wrote cursive in his life.”
Nobody said anything.
Garrett leaned over and looked at the check. Then at the signature. Then at the check.
“Mom,” he said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Marcy said.
“Mom.”
“He signed it,” Marcy said. “He signed it. What do you want me to say? He was dying, his hand was all over the place, so he signed it different. People’s handwriting changes.”
“He couldn’t hold a fork,” I said.
“So I HELPED him. I held the pen with him. His hand was on mine. He knew what it was. He nodded.”
“His hand was on yours,” Garrett said.
“He nodded, Garrett. He nodded at me. You weren’t there. None of you were there. She was at the store getting cranberry sauce I didn’t even want.” She pointed at Linda. “You think I don’t know how that works? You get them alone in that house for eleven months and you think nobody notices who ends up with everything?”
“Mom, did you sign it or did he?” Garrett said.
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is my name’s on the cover sheet,” Garrett said. “I dropped it at the office. I handed it to Delaney myself. I told her he signed it in front of you.”
“He would’ve signed it,” Marcy said. “If he could have. He would have.”
“Then he would have printed it,” I said.
That was the last thing I said for a while. I didn’t need to say anything else. Marcy did all of it.
“You know what I got?” Marcy said to Linda. “When she left? When my mother walked out on us? I got to be the one at home. I was nineteen. I got Garrett, and a husband who was gone by June, and a mother in Phoenix who called twice a year. And then she came back and died here and left me a ten-thousand-dollar policy like that made up for it. And you got him. You got twenty-six years and the house and the boat and the pension and the Sunday Mass, and everybody at the Legion saying what a saint you are.”
“Mom,” Brittany said. “You told us Arizona.”
“She WAS in Arizona. For three years.”
“You told us she was buried there.”
“I told you what I had to tell you.” Marcy turned back to Linda. “And now you want to lie next to him, too. In front. With his parents. With the good stone. And me in some row nobody’s ever heard of.”
“There’s room by her, Marcy,” Linda said. “There’s always been room.”
Marcy laughed. It was a real laugh, loud, and the ladies in the kitchen stopped wrapping the ham.
“You think I don’t know where my mother is? I know exactly where she is. I’m the one who put her there.”
Garrett sat very still.
“I told him to pick that row,” Marcy said, and she pointed at her son. “I told Garrett, get the open one at the back, by the fence. I knew what row. Let the two of them keep each other company. The first try and the second try. Out by the fence where they belong.”
Brittany lowered her phone.
She didn’t turn it off. She just let it drop down into her lap, still recording the tablecloth.
“Grandma’s been out there this whole time,” Brittany said. “Like, right out there. When we came to Uncle Johnny’s funeral. She was right there.”
“Don’t start,” Marcy said.
“You walked us right past her.”
“I said don’t start, Brittany.”
Garrett picked up the check and held it next to the cursive signature one more time. Then he put it back down, on my side of the table.
“I’m calling Delaney Monday,” he said. “I’m pulling it.”
“You can’t pull it,” Marcy said. “It’s filed.”
“Then I’m telling her what I just heard.”
“I’m your MOTHER.”
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “I know.”
He got up. He didn’t screech the chair this time. He pushed it in under the table and left without his coat. It was still on the back of the chair.
Marcy stared at the door after him.
Then she turned to me, and her whole face changed, and it was the face I’d seen in the black dress in the wedding pictures.
“You did this,” she said. “You. At his funeral. You couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
I didn’t answer.
“He’d be ashamed of you,” Marcy said. “Dragging this out in front of the whole parish. Over a hole in the ground.”
“You started it over a hole in the ground,” Brittany said.
It was quiet, and she wasn’t looking at her mother when she said it. She was looking at the photograph, which Linda had put back on the table, face up.
Then Brittany looked at me.
“I’m not doing this with you either,” she said. “Don’t call me. I mean it.”
She put her phone in her purse and stood up and went out the same door as Garrett.
Marcy buttoned her coat. Her hands were shaking so badly she missed two of the buttons.
“Enjoy the front row, Linda,” she said, and she left.
So it was just me and Linda and Sergio, and the plate with the two deviled eggs and the torn paper on it.
Linda set the silver pen down next to the form. She lined it up with the edge of the table.
Sergio held out the manila envelope.
I put the check inside. Then the pieces of the copy. Then the photograph.
I closed the little metal clasp and pressed it flat.
The eight o’clock Mass
Monday morning I took the envelope to the parish office.
The girl at the desk was Delaney. She was younger than me, with a cardigan and a cross on a chain. She read Grandpa’s three lines twice and then put the photo face down like it might bite her.
She already had a voicemail from Garrett.
She looked at the check next to the signature for maybe ten seconds. Then she went into the back and came out with the original and held them side by side under the desk lamp.
“I’m going to void this,” she said. “And I’m going to need to keep this.”
She meant the check.
“Can I get it back after?” I said.
“It has to stay in the file,” Delaney said. “In case anybody contests it. I’m really sorry.”
I said okay.
She stapled it to a cover sheet. The staple went right through the corner, through the memo line, through BIRTHDAY.
That’s where it is now. In a drawer in a parish office in Kenosha, in a folder with Linda’s name on it.
Brittany blocked me that night. Instagram, Facebook, my number. Her mother’s post with the shoulders picture came down the same week.
Garrett texted me once. Sorry about your check. That’s all it said.
I haven’t heard from Marcy. I don’t expect to.
The Sunday after that I drove up the way I always did. Ninety minutes. I got there before Linda for once, and I waited in the parish lot while the eight o’clock let out.
She came down the church steps in her good wool coat, holding two bunches of carnations against her chest. Pink and white, in the cellophane.
We walked across the lot together. Past the hall, past the clock in the window that still said the wrong time.
At the front section she stopped at Grandpa. The tarp was gone. There was a temporary marker on a stake, a little metal card with his name typed on it.
Linda knelt down and set the first bunch at the foot of it.
She lined them up with the edge of the marker like that mattered.
Then she stood up and handed me the second bunch.
“You take hers,” Linda said. “Mind the ice by the fence.”
I went the long way, past my dad, to the back.
If someone in your family has been carrying a second bunch of flowers for years, ask them who it’s for.
Family disputes over money and what’s fair can get ugly fast – see what happened when one woman sold the lake house and moved in with her son and another faced her family in Room 3B. And when boundaries at home are tested, one mother-in-law’s demand for the guest wing makes for another tense family showdown.
