The woman on the line was Judge Pike. She said, Mrs. Hoyt, I notarized that purchase myself when I was a girl working in my fathers church office. I remember your Bill. Tell me what the new company said.
I told her. The resale. The family from Indianapolis. The spot by the highway.
In 1979, she said, her father, Reverend Pike, had helped Bill and me buy both plots at Beech Grove, side by side, and the receipt in Bills vest was the proof, with the cemeterys original seal and the full amount paid. When the cemetery changed hands, the new company simply never entered the second plot into their system, and then sold what was never theirs to sell.
Judge Pike pulled the old county records that very afternoon. The 1979 purchase was there, recorded, both plots, paid in full, in Bills name and mine.
They tried to put a stranger in the ground beside my husband, in the place I have been saving for myself for forty-six years.
The judge made two calls, and the Saturday burial was moved to another section, with apologies all around and a plot the cemetery gave that Indianapolis family at no charge, which was the decent thing. Plot 17 and the plot beside it stayed exactly what they always were. Ours.
I still go every Sunday after church with fresh carnations. I kneel at Bills stone, and I look at the quiet patch of grass beside it, and I am not afraid of it anymore. Bill saw to that, the way he saw to everything, from the inside pocket of an old orange vest I could never bring myself to wash.