Five weeks after my husband died, I paid $5,800, nearly all I had saved, for the empty ground beside his so I could lie next to him when my turn came. On what would have been our anniversary I drove out to visit him, and somebody was already in it, under a stone with a face I hadn’t seen in eighteen years.
Twenty-seven years married, and Jermaine went off a two-lane outside Erie in freezing rain, coming home from a store visit he could have skipped.
I never got a last word with him.
We’d settled it years back, out on the porch with the bug zapper going.
“Side by side, Suzie,” he said. “You don’t get rid of me down there either.”
So the week after the service I signed for the spot on his left.
“It’s in your name now, hon,” the lady in the office said. “Nobody else can touch it.”
Sunday was our anniversary.
I bought yellow tulips, the only flower he ever bothered to learn, and drove out to Ashtabula after church.
Halfway up the slope my legs went slow.
The ground on Jermaine’s left was a long mound of fresh-turned dirt, and at the head of it sat a gray granite marker that had not existed five weeks ago.
MY ground.
The receipt was still in my glovebox. It said PAID IN FULL.
“That’s mine,” I said.
The tulips were in the grass. I don’t remember letting go.
Then I got close enough to see the picture, in a little plastic stand at the marker’s foot.
Gabrielle.
My cousin. My maid of honor. The one who walked out of town eighteen years ago and never sent her own mother a postcard.
My aunt used to say, “She’ll turn up when she’s broke.”
Nobody found her. Nobody ever said the word dead.
And there she was, BURIED NEXT TO MY HUSBAND, in the spot I paid for.
Under a bunch of red roses lay a folded card zipped inside a sandwich bag, my name on the front in her loopy handwriting.
I opened it right there.
“Suzie. If this is in your hands, then I did what I said I would.” ⬇️
The sandwich bag
That was only the first line. The rest was in the same loopy hand, smaller, crowded down the inside of the card like she ran out of room and kept going anyway.
I told Jermaine I’d tell you myself. He drove me to the bus in Erie the night I left, and he came up every second Thursday after that. Don’t be mad at him. Be mad at me. And don’t let Mama tell it. G.
I read it twice standing up. Then I sat down in the wet grass between the two of them, because my knees made the decision for me.
On the back, in pencil, in somebody else’s hand, was a phone number with an 814 area code and one name. Nina.
Every second Thursday.
Jermaine’s district had six stores, and the Erie one got him once a month, second Thursday, regular as the gas bill. He’d come in after dark with a box of lemon cookies from the place by the interstate, and I’d eat two and complain about my hips and eat a third.
Eighteen years of lemon cookies.
I put the card back in the bag and zipped it shut. I picked up the tulips and laid them on Jermaine’s sod, not on hers. I tried to work out how many Thursdays that was, and I couldn’t get past the last one.
The night he went off that two-lane was a second Thursday.
The counter in the office
Gabrielle was twenty-two at my wedding, the baby of the family, five years behind me and always running to catch up.
She stood at my left elbow at the altar the whole service, fixing my hem every time I shifted. The pastor had told us where to stand at rehearsal. Bride on the groom’s left. Jermaine said later that was the only part of the whole day he remembered without the pictures.
That was why I picked the left one. The lady in the office had the map out on the counter and said both sides were open, left or right, same price, and I didn’t even have to think.
Nine years after the wedding, Gabrielle was gone.
The way Aunt Arlene told it, there was a birthday supper, and then there was three thousand dollars missing out of the coffee can on top of her refrigerator, and by Monday Gabrielle’s room was empty. Arlene called every one of us that week. She said the same thing every time.
“She’ll turn up when she’s broke.”
I believed her. My mother had passed the year before, and Arlene was her only sister, and Arlene was what I had left of that side.
So for eighteen years I’ve driven her to church on Sundays. She sits on the aisle and puts a folded twenty in the plate every single week. Once I asked how she managed it on a cafeteria pension, and she patted my knee.
“The Lord stretches it, honey.”
Jermaine had his own Sunday. Fridays were his. Every Friday morning on his way to work he stopped at the post office to mail the light bill, because he would not pay it on the computer. I paid everything else online and gave up arguing about the lights twenty years ago.
“I don’t trust a machine with the electric, Suzie,” he said.
Arlene came with me to the cemetery office the week after the service. She held my purse while I signed. She asked the lady one question.
“And if she doesn’t need it for thirty years, it just sits there empty?”
“Yes ma’am,” the lady said.
Arlene folded the whole packet of paperwork into her own purse. “You’ll lose it, you’re not yourself,” she said. That Wednesday she had me over and slid a stack across her kitchen table: thank-you cards for the church ladies, the memorial fund book, an insurance claim, something from the cemetery. I signed every page she turned to me.
The tow yard had sent the things from Jermaine’s cab home in a plastic tub. It was in my hall closet with the lid still taped.
I left the cemetery with Gabrielle’s card on the passenger seat and drove straight to Arlene’s.
Arlene’s storm door
She saw my car from the front window. She was at the storm door before I got up the steps, and she didn’t open it.
“I wondered when you’d go up there,” she said.
“How long, Arlene?”
“Sixteen days.” She said it like she’d been keeping count. “Graveside. Me and the funeral man and some woman from up there. That’s all she had.”
“You buried your daughter two weeks ago and you didn’t call me.”
“You’d just put your husband in the ground. I wasn’t going to hang that on you too.” She shifted her weight. “I did you a kindness, Suzanne.”
I held up the sandwich bag against the glass. She looked at it the way you look at a bill you thought you already paid.
“That’s my ground,” I said.
“She asked to be near him. In writing. Near Jermaine.” Arlene let that sit. “A woman doesn’t ask that about her cousin’s husband for nothing. You think about why.”
“How did you get it? It’s in my name.”
“It was in your name,” she said. “And then you gave it to family. I’ve got the copy in the drawer.”
“I never gave it to anybody.”
She finally pushed the storm door open about four inches, enough for me to smell her pot roast.
“You signed it, honey. Right there at my kitchen table.”
Monday, nine o’clock
The lady in the office remembered me. She remembered the tulips, too, because one of the men had found a bunch of yellow flowers blown against the fence and brought them in.
She pulled the folder before I finished my sentence.
It was one sheet, the cemetery’s own form. Authorization for Interment. The owner of the plot gives permission for the following person to be buried in it. At the bottom was my signature, the real one, the S with the loop I’ve been making since sixth grade.
The name in the box at the top was typed. Gabrielle’s full name, her birth date, her date of death.
“Your aunt brought it in already filled,” the lady said. “It’s the owner’s signature. That’s all I’m allowed to go by, hon.”
“I didn’t know what I was signing.”
She took her glasses off. She didn’t look happy about what came next.
“Then that’s a different conversation. If you’re telling me that, officially, I have to call our attorney, and he’s going to want to talk to whoever walked this in.” She tapped the form. “I’d want to be sure before you say it.”
“What would it take to move her?”
“Next of kin has to consent. That’s your aunt. Then the county. Then it runs about thirty-four hundred dollars, and that’s if the ground cooperates.”
I had a little over four hundred dollars in savings. Arlene was never going to consent to anything.
I looked at the form again so I wouldn’t have to look at her. There were two dates on it. One was the date I signed, in my handwriting, next to my name. One was the date of death, typed in the box at the top.
My signature was eleven days older than Gabrielle’s death.
Area code 814
I called the number from the parking lot with the engine running.
“This is Nina,” a woman said, and then, when I told her who I was, “Oh, Lord. You found it.”
She’d lived with Gabrielle nine years in a duplex on the east side of Erie. She did home health, nights. Gabrielle had worked the bakery counter at a grocery until her back got bad and then the rest of her got bad. Hospice since the summer.
“And my husband,” I said.
“Second Thursday. He’d bring her those lemon cookies from out by the interstate and sit an hour and do her crossword in pen and get it wrong.” She laughed a little and stopped. “She told him not to come that night. Rain was coming in sideways. He said he’d already told you he had the store.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She never got over that. She wrote your card the next week. She made me promise to put it on his grave the day before your anniversary, because she said you go Sunday after church and you don’t miss it. I didn’t know the date till she told me. Then they put her right next to him, so I just set it on hers.”
“Who put her there?”
“Your aunt handled all that. Hospice called her back in the summer, when Gabby signed on. She knew.” Nina was quiet a second. “She never came up. Not once.”
“Then how’d she pay for a funeral? Arlene doesn’t have funeral money.”
“Gabby had a policy on herself. Ten thousand. Her mother’s the beneficiary. She said, Mama’s not paying one dime to bury me, that’s the least I can do.” Nina breathed out. “You’re telling me she didn’t pay for the plot?”
I said, “No.”
“Well.” She said it slowly. “There was one more thing. Every month, when Gabby cashed her check, she gave him an envelope to mail. She called him her mailman. I never asked who it went to.”
I thanked her. I drove home.
The tub from the tow yard was where I’d left it, in the hall closet, the tape still on the lid.
The glovebox, in a tub
I cut the tape with the kitchen scissors.
It smelled like his truck. Coffee and the pine thing that hung off the mirror. His ice scraper was on top, and a CD of the Temptations with a cracked case, and a pair of his reading glasses I’d been looking for since the funeral. The tow man had emptied the glovebox straight in. Registration, insurance card, a tire gauge, two napkins from a Wendy’s.
Under all of it was a bank envelope, fat, with a rubber band around it twice.
I sat down at the kitchen table and took the band off.
They were money order receipts. The little customer copies, the ones you’re supposed to keep. Every one of them two hundred dollars. Every one of them made out in Jermaine’s block capitals to my aunt, her full name, her street, her zip.
The first one was dated the second Friday after Gabrielle left town.
I laid them out in rows by year. The table wasn’t big enough, so I used the counter, and then the top of the stove.
He’d bought them at the post office. On Fridays. The day after Erie.
I thought about the light bill. I’d paid the light bill online for twenty years and never once asked him what he was mailing.
I thought about a folded twenty on the plate, every Sunday, for eighteen years.
Tucked in the back of the envelope was a strip of the stickers they give you at the hospice desk, the kind with VISITOR printed in red and a date written in. He’d peeled each one off his shirt and stuck it on the strip before he drove home. All second Thursdays. The last one was dated the night of the rain.
I counted the receipts twice to be sure. Some months were missing, the year he had his gallbladder out, the January of the ice storm.
Two hundred and nine.
I got a pencil and did it on the back of the tub’s packing slip so I’d have it in writing.
Forty-one thousand, eight hundred dollars, every one of them made out to Arlene.
Arlene’s kitchen table
I went that same evening. She opened the storm door all the way this time, because she thought I’d come to make up.
I didn’t sit. I took the rubber band off and fanned the receipts across her tablecloth, right where the thank-you cards had been.
She looked at them for a long time. Then she went and got her reading glasses, which told me more than anything.
“Those could be anybody’s,” she said.
I didn’t answer that.
“Fine. All right. Fine.” She took her glasses off again. “That girl owed me. Three thousand dollars out of my coffee can and she was gone by Monday, and you know what I did? I went to work. I raised her on a cafeteria check with no help from her father or anybody else, and she walked off like I was a bus stop. So yes. She sent her mother money. That’s what a daughter is supposed to do.”
“You told us you didn’t know where she was.”
“I didn’t want to know where she was.” She pushed a receipt with one finger. “Your husband stood on my porch the second Friday with the first one of these in his hand. Told me Erie. Told me she was all right. I told him to keep them coming and keep his mouth shut, and he did, God rest him. He was good for that, Jermaine. He was always good for that.”
“Hospice called you in the summer.”
“And what was I going to do? Drive up there and beg? She knew where I lived. Eighteen years, she knew exactly where I lived.”
“She asked to be near him.”
“She asked to be near him, and I put her near him. Closer than near. You should be thanking me.” She was louder now. “You weren’t going to need that hole for twenty years, Suzanne. It was sitting there empty. Paid for. She was going in the ground somewhere and I was not going to spend her money on dirt when there was dirt right there.”
“Her money,” I said.
“My money. She put my name on that policy herself. It’s in the bank and it’s staying in the bank, and I’m not ashamed of it.”
I put Gabrielle’s card on top of the receipts.
“The lady at the office wants to know if I knew what I signed,” I said. “If I tell her no, she calls their attorney. He wants to talk to whoever brought it in.”
Arlene’s face did something I had never seen it do in fifty-two years. It went still.
“You’d do that to me. Your own mother’s sister. Over a hole in the ground.”
“The one on his right is fifty-eight hundred,” I said.
She stared at me. Then she said a lot of things. That I was ungrateful, that my mother would be ashamed, that Gabrielle had always been jealous of me and Jermaine both and I was too dumb to see it. That half the church would hear how I came into an old woman’s house and robbed her.
I let her go until she ran out.
Then she got her checkbook out of the drawer where she’d kept my copy of the form, and wrote it standing up, and tore it out so hard it ripped across the memo line.
“And she stays where she is,” Arlene said. “I’m not paying one more cent to dig her up.”
“She stays,” I said.
She held the check out without looking at me.
“Don’t you come Sunday. I’ll get my own ride.”
The second Thursday in January
There are two receipts in my glovebox now. Both of them say PAID IN FULL. One of them has my aunt’s signature on the check stub stapled to it.
Arlene goes to the late service. I go to the early one.
I drove up to Ashtabula on the second Thursday, because it seemed like the right day to go. The grocery store had yellow tulips in a bucket by the registers, flown in from somewhere warm, and I bought two bunches.
The slope was frozen hard. I went up it fine.
The office had put a white stake in the ground on Jermaine’s right with my name on it in marker, so nobody digs there by mistake. On his left, Gabrielle’s roses had gone black in the cold, and the little picture was still in its stand, her face under the plastic.
I put one bunch on Jermaine. I set the lemon cookies on his stone, because Nina said he never once came up there without them.
Then I knelt down on her side, on my old ground, and laid the second bunch of tulips in front of her picture.
“He’s all yours on Thursdays,” I said. “I’ve got him the rest of the week.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who has a cousin they stopped asking about.
For more small-town secrets and neighbors with stories of their own, read The Van Next Door Stopped at Houses Nobody Visited and The Developers Needed My Grandmother’s House to Build Their Riverfront Dream. And when a neighborhood comes together, there’s The HOA President Came to Post a Third Fine and Found the Whole Street in Her Yard.
