Part 3 — The Spring Entry
The place she had written down every April was Linden Hill Cemetery, forty minutes north of our town. I had driven past its gates a hundred times without once wondering why.
The man whose name she had finally written out was Abel Voss. He was eighty-one, tall and bent like a fence post, and he had tended that cemetery for fifty-two years.
He was standing at the gate with his cap in his hands, as if he had been expecting me. “You are Clara husband,” he said. “She said you would come when you were ready.”
He walked me to the far corner, under a red maple, to a small gray stone no bigger than a bread box. It read: Baby Girl Grace. 1971. Three days.
I knew my wife as a woman who never lied to me. But I learned that morning that she had been a seventeen-year-old girl sent to a home for unwed mothers, and that no one had asked what she wanted.
She had never told me. In her day you did not speak of it, and when I met her, she was afraid that sorrow would take up all the room between us.
So every spring she drove up alone with seed packets and a trowel. Abel kept the grave all year. In April she planted forget-me-nots, and the two of them stood in silence for ten minutes, and then she drove home.
“I wrote her last year that I would keep it,” Abel said. “She said she had run out of good reasons to keep coming back, because her strength was gone. I told her I was not.”
The line I had misread for weeks was not a goodbye to a man. It was a goodbye to a daughter she could no longer reach.
Abel handed me a tin of seed packets she had left with him, each one labeled in her careful hand. Forget-me-not. Sweet pea. Bleeding heart.
I knelt in the grass and planted them with my own hands. I do not think I have ever been so quiet.
That Sunday I told our grown children about their older sister. My daughter wept and then asked to see the stone. We went together.
Some love is so tender that a person keeps it in the garden for fifty years, because words would have been too small to hold it.
Every April now, I drive up with my children. Abel pours the coffee, and we plant in a row. My wife wrote the last entry for me after all. It said: Please keep coming back.