The tall old man on my porch stood with his hat in both hands, and his brother stood a step behind him, and neither of them looked angry. They looked tired, and a little frightened, like two boys sent to the principal. “Mrs. Kemmer,” said the taller one, through the glass of the door, “my name is Gordon Lindemann. May we speak with you, please? We are not here to make trouble. We are here because of the flowers.” I looked at the lawyer, and he gave me a small nod. I opened the door.
They sat in my living room on the good sofa, two old men in their seventies in sport coats, and I brought out coffee and the cinnamon rolls I had made for church. Mr. Dykema stood by the window with the sealed letter in his hand. Gordon cleared his throat several times. At last he said, in a low voice, that he and his brother Alvin had not been to the grave of their aunt Cora in forty years, and that they had come to say they were sorry.
I was astonished. I had expected greed, or lawyers, or at least a cold look. Gordon explained that Cora had raised him for a year when his mother was ill. She had been the kindest person he knew. She had lost her only son in the Korean War, and she had been left alone, and when she died, the two nephews, young and careless, were busy with their own lives. They had meant to visit. Then the years had slipped by, and the shame had grown too big to climb over.
A grave left to the crabgrass for forty years is not a sign that no one remembered, but that someone remembered too painfully to come.
Mr. Dykema opened the letter then, with my permission, and read it aloud in his careful voice. Cora had written it in 1985, a year before she died. She said she had made a strange will on purpose. She did not want her land to go to people who would not miss her.
If a stranger cared for her grave without being asked, she wrote, that person had a heart worth rewarding. And if the nephews came in the end, ashamed, then she had been right about them too. She wrote that she loved them both. She asked me to be kind.
Alvin, the smaller brother, began to cry. He took out a big white handkerchief and blew his nose. Gordon put a hand on his shoulder. I sat there in my own chair, holding a roll that I was not eating, and I felt, strangely, as if I had been invited into the middle of a family reunion that was not my own. I thought of Walter, and of how I tell him the news every Sunday. I thought that Cora would have understood.
I did not decide right away, of course. I hired a lawyer of my own, a young woman from the church, and we met with Mr. Dykema three times. The estate, it turned out, was worth just over six hundred thousand dollars. By the strict terms of the will, it was mine, and the nephews had no claim at all. But the more I thought about it, the more I kept returning to the letter. Cora had wanted her family to come back. She had never said they must come back poor.
So I made a decision, and I made it at my kitchen table, with a pot of coffee and the picture of Walter beside me. I kept half. I gave one quarter to each nephew, with the condition that they visit the grave on her birthday for as long as they lived. And I set aside a small part for something I had been dreaming about for years. A scholarship in the name of Cora Lindemann, for cafeteria workers and janitors and bus drivers who want to go to school late in life.
The first recipient was a night janitor from the junior high, a man named Luis, who was fifty one. He cried when I handed him the letter. We stood at the grave together in October with a thermos, and I planted him a pot of yellow mums, as I had for Cora and Walter. The nephews came too, in a black sedan. They stood at the back with their hats off. Gordon whispered, “Aunt Cora, we are here,” and the wind moved in the big maple.
Walter and Cora lie side by side now under that tree, with flowers at both stones, and the crabgrass is gone. Every Sunday after church I bring my thermos and sit on the bench. I tell my husband the news, and then, because it seems only fair, I tell Cora. I tell her about the scholarship, and Luis, and the nephews who now bring sandwiches. I tell her that the lunch lady from the junior high is still here, and I have never been so grateful.