“…15-D. Beside my mother. Where he paid for it to be in 1994.”
Nobody applauded. A funeral is not a courtroom. My aunt made a small noise. Marguerite went white, and then she did something I did not expect. She sat down in the front pew and cried, loudly, in a way that embarrassed everyone including her, and the service went ahead thirty minutes late with her sobbing through it.
We buried him at half past one. She stood at the very back. Afterward, Mrs. Fenwick walked over the grass and handed me an envelope my father had left with her in February, the same week he told me about the cemetery.
I read it in my car.
He wrote that he was sorry. Not for Marguerite, but for himself. He wrote that he married her fourteen months after Marisol died because he could not manage a five-year-old and a house and his own grief at once, and that he knew within two years it had been a mistake, and that he stayed because leaving would have meant admitting he had used a woman as furniture. He wrote that she had understood that long before he did, and that everything she did to me over thirty years came out of knowing she had always been second in her own home.
Then the last line. He asked me, if I could manage it, to let her have 15-D when her time came, and to take the plot by the road myself, or give it away, or let it go empty.
I sat in that car a long time.
I did not do it. I told Mrs. Fenwick the following week to leave the reservation exactly as it stood, my mother, my father, and no one else beside him. Marguerite still owns 17-C and 17-D near the road, and she will be buried there alone.
I am not certain that was right. My father asked me for one thing after thirty years of Sunday calls from a garage, and it was the only request he ever made, and I refused it.
August comes around and I think about tomatoes. I have never brought Mrs. Fenwick any.
