Peggy put her finger on the line in the green ledger and read the name of the 1979 burial in grave 3, the one with no stone and no marker, the one Herman never told me about. It was a baby. Herman and his first wifes infant daughter, who lived only a few days, in 1979.
My husband carried a grief for forty years he could never say out loud, a little girl buried without a marker, and the daughter who hated me never knew she once had a baby sister in that same lot.
Peggy had already stopped the burial. Maam, we cant bury your mother in this grave, she told Monica. Daddy owned these graves, Monica said. He did, Peggy answered, and he put this one in Idas name, and held up my certificate of interment rights, lot 14, grave 2, issued to Ida, signed over by Herman in 2009. Nobody gets buried here without her written permission, not even family, and damaging a monument is a police matter. Monicas face went red, Curtis took my arm and said my mamas name is going back on that stone.
Then Peggy found the third grave, the 1979 burial, and read the name.
I am Ida, seventy-seven. I cooked breakfast at a diner in Paducah for twenty-eight years, two over easy and rye toast every morning at 6:15, which is how I met Herman, divorced eleven years when we married in 1994. We had thirty years together. When we turned sixty he set aside two graves in his familys lot and bought one gray stone for both of us, his name on the left, mine on the right, my death date left blank. After he passed his daughter Monica had my name ground off the granite so she could bury her own mother in my spot, and told me I was a waitress he felt sorry for.
I did not argue. I got the cemetery certificate out of Hermans cash box and carried it to the service, and Peggy read it and stopped the men at the lowering straps.
A certificate of interment rights means the grave is mine, and no one, not even family, is buried there without my written word, and chiseling a name off a stone is a crime. That was settled.
But grave 3 was something neither Monica nor I knew. In 1979, long before I ever ordered rye toast for Herman, he and his first wife had a daughter who lived only a few days, and they buried her in that family lot and could not bear to mark it, and Herman carried that silence for the rest of his life. Monica had not been born yet. She never knew she had a sister in the ground she was fighting over.
And I, who had every right to send her away with nothing, did not. Monicas mother was that babys mother too. So I told Peggy, and I told Monica, that the one thing that would be right was to let her mother rest near the daughter she lost in 1979, in that end of the lot, and I signed the permission for it myself. My place beside Herman stayed mine. Hers was beside her baby.
Who invited the cook, Monica said when I walked up. A cook who kept her husbands papers in a cash box, and who found room in a forty-year marriage of grief to be kind to the woman who wronged her. My name went back on the granite beside Herman. And a little girl who lay unmarked since 1979 finally had her mother laid down near her, which is more than either of us expected to give that day.