…drove to Greenwood in the gray light, parked where Mr. Otis couldn’t see me, and waited. At seven exactly a woman came up the path with a bunch of zinnias. About my age, careful in her step, and already crying before she reached the stone. I got out of the car, and she froze like a deer, the flowers shaking in her hands. “Please,” she said. “I never meant to take anything from you.”
Her name was Vera. And sixty years ago, before I ever met him, before the Army, before Montgomery, Roy had loved her first. They were seventeen, promised to each other in a little church in Selma, when her daddy moved the family clear to Ohio and the letters, the way letters did back then, stopped finding their way. Each thought the other had let go. They both married elsewhere. They both, it turned out, kept a corner of the heart shut like a spare room.
Four years before he passed, Roy found her name in a church directory and wrote her one last letter — not to rekindle anything, but to say he’d had a good life, a good wife, and he hoped she had too. They spoke on the phone, old friends now, twice a year. She never once set foot in our life. But when he died she started coming Tuesdays, two days off my Sundays, so our griefs would never collide. “He talked about you like you hung the moon,” she told me, wiping her eyes. “I only wanted to thank the boy I lost for growing into a man who made somebody happy.”
We stood together at Roy’s grave, two women who had loved him across a whole lifetime, and I put my zinnias beside her zinnias. The stranger I feared was a secret turned out to be the tender proof that my husband had been loved, and had loved well, long before he ever found his way home to me.