The tapping skittered through the cemetery with a volume amplified by the dead-of-night still. This mission, he hoped, would be the last.
At Katie’s instruction, John crept into Eastlawn a few nights earlier to apply the plaster to Larry’s headstone, giving it time to set. Now, with sculpting tools borrowed from art class, Katie came back with him to chisel in 2015.
The year of Larry’s death had been a lie. It was time to set things straight.
“It’s vandalism,” Robin had protested.
“It’s our headstone,” John replied. “We paid for it.”
“Don’t you think it’s going to raise questions?”
“How much time do you spend fact-checking other people’s graves?”
“It’s going to look ridiculous!”
“Yeah, well,” John shrugged. “Sometimes, so does my family.”
It was not in Robin to back down. “What if you get caught?”
“I really think you’re overthinking this.”
* * *
There was plenty of careful monitoring of Rose after Larry died. When she woke up that morning next to her husband, she wasn’t told that he was dead. And yet when she was led away from him she gave no indication that she expected to see him again. Disoriented and unable to focus, no one spoke as they returned her to her home. Mike stayed awake in the living room as she slept soundly until the next morning.
When she finally came to the breakfast table, John and Mike waited anxiously. John brought her favorite blueberry muffins and a big pot of coffee simmered. They watched her intently as she shuffled sleepily into the room, brightening as she found her two boys and a tray of goodies waiting for her.
“I could have slept the day away,” she said sighed contentedly as she tucked into her first muffin.
“It’s good to see you sleeping so well,” John said warily, studying her closely.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked John, and then appeared to confuse her two sons. “You have a job. Don’t you?”
“Sure. And Mike, he’s looking. Something will turn up,” John said. “But, today, it just seemed like we should … You know. Hang out. If you wanted to talk.”
John and Mike resolved to not bring up Larry unless Rose did. It was cowardice, but it was also out of respect for the delicate state of her mind.
They did what they charged themselves with doing; they brought Rose the news of her husband. It seemed inconceivable that it hadn’t stuck, but if she had to cope by folding the night before into the shifting sands of her everyday grip on reality, that’s what they would allow her.
Hearing she had both sons to herself, Rose beamed as she laid her hands on their arms. “How did I get so lucky?”
They sat together all day, Rose intermittently slipping away to nap. Over lunch they watched Days of Our Lives. At some point in this ritual that Mike and Rose had come to share, Mike took on the job of making the soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. The bread was browned perfectly, the cheese melted just so.
“Is she the one trying to get Serena to leave town?” Rose asked as they settled in before the soap opera.
“No. That’s Nicole. This one,” Mike said, pointing to the TV, “is Paige. Remember? She’s JJ’s girlfriend, but JJ also slept with Eve, Paige’s mom. Eve’s trying to get Cole to set up JJ to get him arrested for drugs, but Dr. Jonas might rat out Eve first ’cause he just figured out that she slept with JJ. So … It’s some crazy shit.”
“Language,” Rose scolded Mike, as John smiled fondly at the two of them.
* * *
When by the next day Rose still hadn’t mentioned Larry, John knew it could not be avoided. They had to make arrangements.
There could be no funeral. The empty casket planted in the ground in 1985 could not now be replaced by an occupied one without spilling the secret wide open. As instructed by Walt Bolger before he left town, John warily called on Todd Stanton at the funeral home. As he nervously ushered John into his office, Todd—a few years older than John and now the prosperous owner of his father’s mortuary—was wary now that the mysterious burden his father bequeathed to him decades earlier was finally coming due.
Todd explained to John that his father gave him no details, just that if the day came that he received a call concerning Larry Husted he was to open the doors to the business to him and perform his duties with the utmost decorum and secrecy. Todd spent years wondering what the hell his father did.
John told Todd the whole story; here was one of the very few people who could be trusted with the secret. When John finished, Todd was pale.
“Holy shit,” he said in awe.
“Tell me about it,” John smiled.
“I mean…” Todd said, struggling to figure out what his obligation was here. “I’m sorry, about my father. If by going along with this he caused your family…” He trailed off, completely at a loss to make sense of it.
“It’s okay,” John said generously. “It turned out okay.”
Todd chuckled with relief, shaking his head in wonder. “Those crazy fuckers.”
Todd found a memory. “Your father treated me once, when I was eight. I broke my arm,” he said fondly. “He was a really nice guy. I was scared and it hurt like hell, but he made me laugh.”
John smiled gratefully.
“It will be an honor to see to this for your family,” Todd said earnestly.
* * *
John called Dean Durning as soon as they got Rose settled back home. Durning had the good sense to receive the news respectfully and without betraying a whiff of the incredible relief he felt.
John wanted Larry tended to immediately; his body would not lie in that rotted building until the cover of night returned. Durning pointed out that sending the funeral home’s van in the daylight, even around to the hidden back door, would be too big a risk. They agreed that Durning would drive his family’s van and that he and Todd Stanton would remove the body.
Stanton firmly refused to allow John to be present. There was no way that the funeral home director, a respected man around town, would allow a family to endure such an indignity. Todd’s father would expect no less of him.
Todd would cremate Larry’s body after-hours. He offered to prepare Larry for viewing if the family desired, but John and Mike knew instinctively that they wanted their final memory of Larry to be the one in their mother’s arms.
Rose, they decided, had seen enough. In time, they would move Larry’s urn into John and Robin’s living room, where they would attempt to re-create a smaller version of the picture-filled family shrine Rose kept in the old house.
They knew that as her mind continued to fail and the disruption of moving her in with them caused her agitation, it would be healthy to provide her a quiet space where hopefully the photos and mementoes would comfort her where her memory couldn’t. If she ever asked how that urn came to be among the family collection, and who was in it, they’d figure out an explanation then.
* * *
“Mom, it feels like we should do something. For Dad,” John said in her living room, several days after Larry died. Mike was there, too. They still didn’t know what she understood but felt forced to delicately try to address it. “Maybe go out to dinner, the whole family, and just raise a glass to him.”
“That would be wonderful,” she smiled, touched by the suggestion. She looked to Larry’s portrait on the shelf. “He was a great man, your father. We were lucky to have him as long as we did.”
This told them nothing.
“Mom,” Mike said firmly. “Dad is dead. Really dead.”
“I know,” she said disapprovingly, offended by their need to tell her the obvious. “I was there.”
“When?” John asked, tempering his exasperation.
“When he died.”
In a perfect universe, this would be a delicious joke, Rose knowingly talking in oblique circles as she playfully drove her sons mad. As it was, John and Mike were beyond flummoxed.
John slid closer. “Are you talking about … a long time ago?”
She sighed and looked at one of the old photos of her with her husband. They were in a hammock somewhere, looking to be in their late twenties, before Mike came along.
Larry laid back contentedly, an arm cocked behind his head, while Rose lay beside him, her head on his chest. She smiled into the camera lens, while he drank her in.
“Everything was so long ago,” she said.
She unexpectedly brightened, as if turning a page. “We could go to the Sunset. Your father loved that place!”
“Okay,” John smiled.
“And Robin? And…?”
“Katie,” John said quickly. “Yeah, the whole family.”
“And we’ll tell stories. About your father,” she said eagerly, before wilting sadly. “I don’t know them anymore.”
“You gave us the stories, Mom,” Mike assured her. “We’ll give them back to you.”
She glowed at the idea.
* * *
Katie squinted in the dark and tapped on the chisel while John held the flashlight. As Robin predicted, the crudely etched new date on the headstone was turning out badly. Despite her talent and best intentions, this was an assignment that no artist could hope to pull off.
“It looks awful!” she sighed.
“It’s great,” John said appreciatively, pleased that she agreed to come do it with him at all. “Your grandfather would love it.”
Katie etched out the final 5 in the year as she mumbled, mostly to herself. “Could my family be any more bizarre?”
John smiled. “Quiet, you. You’ll bring your kids here someday, and you’ll tell them the whole story. They’ll think you’re the freak for having played along with all this.”
“Can I make up the parts that you’re never going to explain to me?”
He studied his daughter in the dark. “I would expect no less.”
Despite her dissatisfaction with her work, she applied careful attention to the job. As she finished, she blew away the remaining dust, then buffed the plaster with a fine abrasive sheet. John marveled at her determination.
After perfecting it as best she could, she sat back to assess the result. Grandpa now died at seventy-eight, not forty-eight. And he was back at the house, on the mantel.
She rested on an empty stretch of ground beside the grave.
“Is this where Grandma will go?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” John said, unprepared for the question but not thrown by the eventuality.
“Soon?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Things are going to be hard for her. But maybe not for a while.”
“Right,” Katie said. “Not too soon. But not too long.”
“Right,” John agreed, loving her for the simple way she crystallized his hope.
She yawned and then shivered in the cold night air.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” he said as he stood stiffly.