I looked across the booth at him. At his blue shirt. At his reading glasses. At the little girl asleep on his arm, with her braid and her missing tooth and a name that was borrowed.
At his chest, rising and falling. Steady and strong.
“But I think,” I said slowly, “if I’d been standing in that hallway, I’d have done the same thing.”
Daniel put his hand over his mouth.
“And I think,” I said, “I’d have lied to me too.”
Part Fifteen: The Grave
The next Sunday was October fifth.
Daniel drove me to Calvary Cemetery in Dayton, where Rose is buried. Arthur is there now too. I had them put him right beside her. It was what he would have wanted.
Rose’s headstone is small and gray, about the size of a shoebox, set flat into the grass. It says Rose Marie Delaney, April 14 – April 17, 1986. Our Little Flower.
Daniel had never seen it. Arthur had never brought him here.
He knelt in the grass beside the little stone. He was quiet for a long time. Then he reached out and touched it with his fingertips, the way you’d touch a sleeping baby’s cheek so you wouldn’t wake her.
“Hi, Rose,” he whispered.
Little Rose knelt beside her father. She was holding a small bunch of flowers she’d picked from her grandmother’s garden. Late roses, pink and yellow, wrapped in a paper towel.
She set them on the stone.
“These are for you,” she said. “I’m Rose too. I’m taking care of the name.”
I sat down on the little folding stool Daniel had brought for me. I looked at the two stones side by side. My daughter. My husband.
