The woman who ran the diner on Main Street for forty years. Loretta Sims. Everybody in town called her Miss Retta. She poured my first cup of coffee when I was twelve.
My aunt told me the rest on the phone, slowly, like she had been holding it for sixty seven years.
In 1959 Loretta was sixteen. She got pregnant and her father put her out of the house in January with a paper sack of clothes. My grandmother found her sitting in the bus station. She brought her home and gave her the back bedroom and told the neighbors she was a cousin from Memphis.
The baby came early, in April. A little girl. She lived two days.
The county would have buried her in the pauper section with a number. My grandmother would not allow it. She put that baby in our family plot and paid for the stone herself. She put our last name on it so nobody would ask questions and hurt Loretta any more than she had already been hurt.
The first name on the stone was the one Loretta chose. The baby was named after her.
For sixty seven years, a woman I saw every week of my life had a daughter buried twenty feet from my grandparents, and she never once said a word.
Loretta is eighty three now. She sold the diner in 2015 and lives in a little brick duplex behind the Methodist church.
I sat in my car outside for a long time before I knocked. When she opened the door, I did not know what to say. So I said I found the stone.
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she stepped back and let me in and put on a pot of coffee, the same way she did every morning for forty years.
She said my grandmother saved her life. She said she went to that grave every year on the anniversary, early in the morning so nobody would see. She said she always pulled the grass back from the stone, and every year it grew back over, and she was getting too old to kneel.
I told her I had been walking past it for thirty years and never knew. She patted my hand and said that was exactly how my grandmother wanted it.
Then I asked her something I had been thinking about the whole drive over. Would she want the stone to say the truth now?
She cried then. The only time. She said she had never been allowed to say the name of her daughter out loud to anybody.
My aunt and I paid for a new marker. It sits right beside the old one, which we cleaned and left exactly where my grandmother put it. The new one has the full name, the dates, and a line underneath. Beloved daughter of Loretta.
We had a little service in April. My aunt came in her wheelchair. Half the old diner regulars showed up. Loretta stood at the stone with her hand on it and said the name of her baby girl in front of forty people.
Then everybody went back to the church for coffee. Loretta poured.