I don’t know how long we sat there. The room was very quiet. I could hear a clock somewhere in the house. I could hear a car go by outside on Hollis Avenue.
He wasn’t on his way home from work. He was on his way home from her.
He was on that road because she called him about a drip. A little drip. A washer.
“You,” I said.
My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
“You called him.”
“Yes.”
“For a drip.”
“Yes.”
“He drove out here in the rain for a drip in your sink.” I was getting louder. I couldn’t stop it. “And then he died. Ten minutes later. A mile up the road. Because you didn’t want to put a bowl under your sink.”
Marta didn’t flinch. She didn’t defend herself. She just sat there against the shelves and let me say it.
“Yes,” she whispered.
I stood up. I don’t know how. My legs were shaking.
“You knew,” I said. “You knew who I was. When I told you my name on the porch. You stopped. I saw you stop.”
“I knew your face before that,” Marta said quietly. “I have seen you every Saturday. Seven months. From my window. I watched you sit by his stone and talk to him.”
“And you never came out. Not once. You never told me.”
“How could I?” Her voice finally broke. “How could I walk across the street and say to his mother, it was me? He was on that road because of me? How could I say that?”
“So instead you stole his flowers.”
“I kept them,” she said.
“You stole them!”
“They throw them away!” She said it loud, the first loud thing she’d said. It rang off the walls of the little room. “Every Monday morning. Seven o’clock. The men come with a truck and a big bin, and they take every flower off every grave in that cemetery, and they throw them all into the dumpster behind the toolshed. Every week. Every flower. Everything you brought him. Into the garbage with the coffee cups and the leaves.”
I stared at her.
“I watched them do it,” she said. “The first Monday after his funeral. I watched them throw your sunflowers into the dumpster. And I couldn’t.” She put her hand flat on her chest. “I couldn’t let them do that to him. Not to him.”
Chapter Seven: The Bin Behind the Toolshed
I left.
I’m not proud of it. I walked out of that room, down her hallway, through her kitchen past the bag of dripping flowers and the wooden press, and out the front door. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t look back.
I crossed Hollis Avenue without checking for cars. A pickup truck honked at me. I didn’t even turn my head.
I went back through the pedestrian gate and walked straight to Sam’s grave, and I sat down on the frozen grass in front of his headstone, and I cried so hard I couldn’t see.
I’m not going to pretend I was fair to her that day. I wasn’t.
All I could think was that my son was dead because an old woman didn’t want to wait until Saturday. Seven months of not understanding. Seven months of lying awake wondering why he was on that road, what he was doing, if he’d been somewhere he shouldn’t have been. And now I knew, and it was so small. So stupid. A washer.
I wanted someone to blame. I’d wanted someone to blame for seven months. The rain. The road. The other cars. God. Myself, for not calling him more, for not making him come to dinner that Thursday.
And here she was. A real person. With a name and a face and a padlocked room.
I sat there until my legs went numb. The crow came back and walked around on the next row of graves, looking at me.
Finally I wiped my face on my sleeve. I looked at the sunflowers in the metal cup. Five of them now. Big and yellow and perfect.
Tomorrow was Monday.
I thought about what Marta said. I didn’t believe her. It sounded like an excuse. A story she made up to make herself feel better about creeping around graves with a shopping bag.
But I’d been coming here for seven months, and every Saturday the old flowers were gone. I’d just assumed. I’d never asked.
I got up and walked to the toolshed by the back gate.
Behind the toolshed, half hidden by a row of overgrown hedges, there was a big green dumpster. The lid was open.
I walked over and looked inside.
It was full of flowers.
Dead ones mostly. Brown roses. Dried-up carnations. Wilted lilies, their petals gone slimy. Old wreaths with faded ribbons. Plastic flowers, sun-bleached. A heart-shaped arrangement of white mums with a ribbon that said MOM.
All of it mixed together with soggy leaves, broken pots, coffee cups, a cracked ceramic angel.
I stood there looking at it for a long time.
Somewhere in that pile, from last week, and the week before, and the week before that, there should have been sunflowers. My sunflowers. If Marta hadn’t taken them.
There weren’t any.
