Privately, she wished she had somehow managed to take a few college courses.
Just because she didn’t know any history didn’t mean she couldn’t learn it, she thought.
Or repeat it, she also thought, with a kind of gloomy optimism.
She had to drive with great care to remain safely on her side of the highway, which only added to her rising anxiety. It was worry that had pulled her out of a restless sleep and put her in her car so early in the morning.
There were long stretches where her headlights blinded her in the fog, and it was only the presence of the yellow line that pulled her along to the cemetery. She prayed no crazy rancher was trying to cross the highway with his cows in this weather. She’d known a few that crazy, but most of them had gone out of business-or died-by now. Still, cows and the men who herded them were unpredictable. She knew something about that, too, if she did say so. If a cowboy on a horse suddenly loomed in front of her in the fog, she wouldn’t be surprised. She’d be horrified, because she’d be bound to hit them with her van, but not all that surprised.
With a feeling of relief for having survived the ride, Verna eventually pulled through the cemetery gate.
Normally, she would never have come on a Memorial Day when half the county would show up with their bouquets of real or plastic flowers. Verna lived close enough so that if she wanted to visit graves, she could drop by anytime. It was only because she was feeling desperate that she was here on this day, out of all the days in the year. She had come early, for privacy, and hoped nobody saw her.
Verna threaded her car halfway up the road that led to the top of the hill. There, she pulled over to the side, parked, and got out. She felt a little shaky and out of breath, and had to pause a moment, with her hand on the side of the car, to steady herself before going on.
If she were a kid, she thought, as she started walking onto the grass, she’d feel spooked at being in a cemetery in a fog like this, where she couldn’t see three rows of tombstones ahead of her. But she figured she was too old to be scared by mere death. She had seen too much of it, between the animals and the friends.
The grass smelled newly mown; the air was damp against her skin.
Verna paused by a neat gravestone to say hello to one of them, her old friend Margie Reynolds.
“Hi, Margie.” She cleared her throat and folded her hands together at her waist. “You’ll be pleased to hear that Ellen is doing her usual great job as mayor. That girl is going to be governor some day, I swear. Quentin’s okay, I guess, but we hardly see him anymore. He seems to keep busy with his medicine, and not much else, as far as I can tell. I wish I could tell you that Abby has fallen sensibly in love with my Rex, and that they are going to get married, and that they’re planning to have grandbabies for you and me, but you’d never believe me, if I tried to put that one over on you.” Verna sighed. Neither of her sons, not Patrick nor Rex, had married yet. “By the time I get grandchildren, Margie, I’ll be so old they’ll think I’m already dead.” She purposely avoided telling her late friend about certain recent activities between her older son and Margie’s younger daughter, not wishing Margie to roll uncomfortably in her grave.
“Have you seen Nadine yet?” she inquired. “You know she’s here, right?”
Verna looked around, aware that she’d sound like a nut to anybody who heard her.
If the fog had ears, or there was anybody over the hill, she couldn’t see them.
“Well, I’ll see you later, honey,” she told Margie Reynolds. She started to walk away, but then turned back, and said, in a voice that suddenly trembled, “I still miss you. You oughtn’t to have gone so soon.”
Ellen and Abby’s mom had been only fifty-eight when the cancer took her.
Next, Verna paid her respects to the more recently buried Nadine Newquist.
“I hope you’re back in your right mind again, Nadine,” she said, rather more sharply than she had intended to speak. She told herself it was only because she was trying to pull herself together and get the shakiness out of her voice. “I’m glad you’re out of your suffering, but I’m sorry you had to go that way.” Reluctantly, she dredged up an insincere sentiment, just so she wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. “I miss you, too.” Like hell, she thought, giving up all pretense of feeling the same about Nadine as she had felt about Margie. It was almost shocking what a relief it was not to have to endure Nadine’s barbed wit anymore. If anybody in the world missed that, then Verna was a monkey’s uncle. “Tom seemed kind of lost for a while without you,” she lied. The judge seemed like a man with a heavy burden lifted, as did many relatives of Alzheimer’s victims after their loved ones died. She and Nathan had Tom over for dinner once a week, and it was good to hear the big man laugh again.
“It’s a good thing that he’s got Jeff to take care of.”
As if he ever does, Verna thought, but also didn’t say. No use worrying dead people.
Briskly enough to be almost rude, Verna walked on toward the real goal of her morning.
On this day, with the snow long gone, the simple gravestone stood fully revealed: Peace Be Unto You, 1987. While Verna was in the hospital in Emporia, Nadine and Margie had led the community drive to raise money for the girl’s burial and stone. Then Nadine had topped off the donations with enough extra funds to give her bragging rights to the available virtue. But it was a nice stone, with a hint of pink in its color. The McLaughlins, who owned the funeral parlor and the cemetery, had donated one of the very last plots in the picturesque old part, so there could be a real headstone, and not just a nondescript marker. That’s what everybody had wanted-something that stood tall and substantial, as if to verify that even an unidentified girl had once been real. Everybody had cared, was how Verna remembered it. Everybody had felt awful about what had happened to the girl, and even worse about the idea that nobody had claimed her. The girl had died a stranger among strangers, and so the kindhearted strangers had buried her. That’s how Verna was determined to remember it. History wasn’t her strong suit, which meant she could write it any way she chose.
“Good morning,” she said, formally, to the gravestone.
“I’m Verna Shellenberger, in case you don’t remember me.” Verna had made a few previous trips to the grave, in years past. “It was my husband and boys who found you. I’m awfully sorry about what happened to you, though I expect that’s long gone from your mind by now. Probably even forgiven, too,” she added, hopefully.
“The reason I’m here is to ask you to help my Nathan. I know he doesn’t deserve it. I know all about that. But he’s in constant pain now, from the arthritis. It’s got him so crippled up he can barely leave his bed some days, and it just kills me to see him like that. The only pleasure he ever gets is when he goes to town to have lunch with Quentin and Tom. I know that Harmony Watson said you cured her baby’s colic, and Frank Allison is convinced you made his shingles go away. He was in awful pain, too. And now he’s just fine.”
Verna wondered if she should kneel and fold her hands, as in prayer.
She decided that wasn’t necessary, and besides, the ground was damp.
“If you can find it in your heart to help Nathan, I’d be so grateful. I know this probably doesn’t work tit for tat. Nobody’s ever said you require payment of any kind.” Too late, Verna realized she probably should have brought flowers, just out of respect. “But I’d be glad to help out somebody else, if you let me know if there’s anything you want me to do. Not as payment. I don’t mean to insult you. Just as, well, a kindness in return for what you might do.”
Tears sprang to Verna’s eyes. Her husband was only sixty-five, but he moved like a ninety-year-old man. It wasn’t only that she felt sorry for him, but also that it was hard to live with somebody who was in as much pain as Nathan was, and who was as bad-tempered as he could get when the pain got the worst. The doctors had said he could live a normal life span with this misery, which meant that she could live another thirty years of keeping company with his miserable self, too. The thought of it made her envy her departed friends.