WHO’S GOING TO FIGURE OUT THE TRUTH?
“Honey,” a man’s voice says hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
It’s the second time today I’ve been awakened by an old person. This time, it’s the guy in the battered straw cowboy hat. His riding mower, now silent, stands in the road behind him.
“I’m fine.” I sit up, blinking in the bright sunshine. The dream I was having slips away. A man’s voice, urging me forward. A hand on the back of my head.
“I could have mowed you down.” He offers me a hand. “Here, get up. It can’t be comfortable down there.” Although he must be close to eighty, he has the strong grip of a workingman. His jeans sit high on his waist and end a couple of inches above his Velcro-closed tennis shoes.
I know him. It’s Frank. Nora’s friend. He was at my dad’s—
“You were at the funeral,” I say after he pulls me to my feet. Will he put two and two together? Can he tell I’ve been crying? Maybe he’ll just think I’m a weird teenager.
“That’s right. I knew Terry. I also knew his girlfriend, Naomi.” He looks down at the graves. “Naomi and her mom, Sharon.”
“I’m thinking of renting their old house.” I lean down to brush prickers off my pants, giving me an excuse not to look him in the face. “Nora told me they were buried here, so I thought I’d come visit the graves. But it’s just so hot. I started feeling sleepy. I must have dozed off.”
His face expressionless, Frank says, “Around this place, when we say someone’s taking a dirt nap, it means they’re dead and buried.”
I stare at him for a second before I realize he’s making a joke.
“Well, I’m not dead. Not yet.”
He looks at the two graves again, and his mouth turns down at the corners. “Naomi—she wasn’t much older than you.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes it’s hard to understand why someone so young dies but an old codger like me keeps going.”
“What was she like?” I ask. “Naomi, I mean?”
“Young. She and Terry were too young to have a baby, but they did. Sharon wasn’t happy about that.”
I look down at my flat stomach, try to imagine a baby curled up under my skin. How did my mom feel? Scared? Happy? Both?
“She was a high-spirited gal,” Frank continues. “Beautiful, like her mother.”
I realize he means Grandma. I do the math. Grandma was only fifty-six when she died. If she were alive, she’d still be younger than him. “Were you working here when Naomi was murdered?” All those people who left things on her grave—could her killer have been one of them?
“I’d just started volunteering. For the first year after she died, people came here all the time. Sometimes they’d leave bottles of beer. Candy, snacks, Christmas ornaments.”
“I found those Cheetos.” I point at the bag.
He nods. “Every now and then I’ll find just one red rose. I used to think it might be Terry sneaking back into town, but obviously not.”
I’d always thought my mom belonged to my dad and vice versa, even if they weren’t married. But now there’s this Sam person who loved my dad, and some mystery man who still thinks about my mom. Could the rose be from her killer?
“So people still come?”
“I’ve seen a few. Naomi’s best friend, this redheaded gal named Heather, she still comes around. There’s a homeless guy who likes to sleep here. Sometimes I’ve seen him talking to Naomi’s gravestone. And the police chief—he comes by sometimes, too. He was here last week, right after they figured out it was Terry’s jawbone.” Frank sighs. “Before she died, Sharon used to come here with her granddaughter. Naomi’s kid, Ariel. Sometimes they had picnics right on top of the grave.”
I will my expression not to change. “What do you think happened to Naomi and Terry?”
His lips fold in on themselves. His face is a mass of wrinkles, like a piece of paper that’s been balled up and smoothed out a hundred times. “Maybe they took someone with them that day.”
I hadn’t thought of that. That would mean it had to be a friend. Who’s going to figure out the truth of what happened all these years later? I think of the police chief, his voice choked with tears. Apologizing for not finding my dad fourteen years ago. But it’s clear from the articles in the paper that he has his hands full.
Frank leans down and picks up the Cheetos.
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Throw them away. They’ll just attract varmints.”
“Wait a second.” I grab the bag and check the date. The Cheetos won’t expire for three more weeks.
Frank cocks his head. “What are you looking at?”
“I’m just trying to figure out how long this has been here. Before or after people knew the truth about that Terry guy.”
“Oh, it was after. I pick up stuff like this as soon as I notice it. Leaving food out here is just a bad idea. But people do it all the time.”
Only now do I wonder if there were fingerprints on the bag, fingerprints we must have just destroyed. Although who’s to say who put the bag here? It could just be one of my mom’s friends. It probably wasn’t the killer.
“I guess I’d better be getting back.” I act as if there’s somewhere I have to be. “It was nice talking to you.”
He nods. “Same here.”
Before I go, Frank reaches into his pocket and scatters a handful of yellow birdseed on my mother’s and grandmother’s gravestones. A blue jay lights on a branch above us, and then another and another. They bob lightly in the breeze, too scared—or maybe too smart—to take the chance of eating while we’re so close. They watch and wait for us to go away.
Just waiting until our backs are turned, our attention diverted.