The name on the new plaque was Cora Lindqvist.
Masons mother. The parks directors wife. She had died four years ago in the same spring Imogene did, and the man who walked off the stage toward the parking lot without a word was a widower too.
I did not know any of that until the clerk read the plate. Hiram read it slowly, with a catch in his voice. In loving memory of Cora, who loved this park. It had been installed in the spot where Imogenes bench stood, because it was the best view in Bever Park, facing the pond, in the shade of the oak, and because the director had decided that his wife deserved it.
That did not make it right. I did not say it did. But it changed how I felt, standing there with two hundred people looking at me.
The director came back. He was in his car, I think, with the engine off. He walked back across the grass in the middle of the mayors speech and stopped in front of the new bench. He did not speak to Mason. He did not speak to me. He just put his hand on the back of it for a while, the way I used to put mine on the back of Imogenes.
Then he turned around and said, Albert, I am sorry. I did not know about your agreement. Mason told me the city had no record. I believed him because I did not want to look.
I said, Gene, I know what it is to want a good view.
I had paid thirty-two hundred dollars for a brass plate and twenty-five years of her morning walks, and the city only needed to read its own paper to remember the price.
The solution turned out to be a short one, because two men in their seventies were in the middle of it and they had no time to waste. Hiram found my wifes bench in a storage shed behind the maintenance building, wrapped in a tarp, with the brass plate still on it. It was dusty and unharmed. The city had never thrown it out. Mason had simply moved it out of sight.
The city council voted at the next meeting to reinstall it at its original site, per the agreement. And then, something I had not expected, the director asked whether the council would allow his wifes bench to be moved eight feet to the left, so that the two benches could sit side by side, facing the same pond.
The council agreed. They did it on a Tuesday. Hiram brought a coffee thermos. Mason did the work himself, in jeans and gloves, with a wrench and a level. He did not talk. When he finished, he stood up and said, Mr. Albert, I owe you an apology, and I do not think I can say it right. I said, You just did.
I sat down on Imogenes bench that afternoon, for the first time in six weeks. The concrete was cold. The brass was warm from the sun. The director sat on the other bench, with his hat in his lap, and we looked at the pond for a long time without saying anything at all.
He said, She used to say the ducks were cheating at chess. I said, Mine said they were gossiping. We laughed about it for a little while.
I go every Sunday. So does he. We bring two thermoses, and sometimes the new parks supervisor stops by and asks if we need anything. We tell him a bench is all the park any man needs.