The address the flowers had been going to for thirteen years was not a house. It was a cemetery on the far side of Tucson, the one we buried our boy in.
Michael was nineteen when we lost him. That was almost thirty years ago now. I will be honest, I stopped going out there a long time ago. It hurt more than I could stand, and I told myself he was not really in that ground anyway, and I let the visits go.
I thought Ruth had let them go too. I thought we had grieved him together and come out the other side.
I drove through the gates and followed the numbers, and I found his stone, and on it was a fresh arrangement, not three days old. White and yellow, the colors of the church he loved. Everbloom, every single month, for thirteen years.
A groundskeeper saw me standing there and came over, hat in his hands.
“You would be her husband,” he said. “She came the first Sunday of every month, rain or shine. Toward the end, when her eyes went, your daughter drove her and waited in the car. Miss Ruth would sit with the boy a while, tidy the stone, talk to him low. Then she would leave the fresh flowers and go home.” He paused. “She told me once you could not bear to come. She said that was alright. She said somebody in the family had to keep him company, and she did not mind it being her.”
All those years I believed I had made my peace, my wife had been quietly keeping our son from ever spending a month alone.
I called my daughter from that gravesite, and she started crying before I finished the first sentence. She had been driving her mother out here for three years and never said a word, because Ruth asked her not to. “She did not want you to feel guilty, Dad,” she said. “She just wanted Michael looked after. She said you loved him too much to visit, and she loved you too much to make you.”
I go on the first Sunday now. I have taken over the standing order at Everbloom.
I sit with my boy and I tidy his stone and I talk to him low, the way Ruth did, and I tell him his mother is with him again now, just up the hill, and that between the two of them he will never be lonesome.
Ruth did not keep a secret from me. She carried a weight for me, for thirteen years, so I would not have to. I only wish I had known, so I could have carried it beside her.