Here Lies Linc (17 page)

Puttin’ that key back is gonna be harder than it sounds. I can feel it in my bones. Ha! Get it? Bones?

As it turned out, Winslow was wrong about one thing. The rain didn’t seem to bother Delaney a bit. We had planned to meet in the gazebo on the hill overlooking the stretch of cemetery where the Raintree grave stood. She showed up right on time with a red umbrella and wearing a bright yellow slicker, landing like a parrot in the middle of all of those gray clouds and acres of old stone.

“Mama made me bring this,” she said as she folded her umbrella and dropped it along with her backpack on the long wooden glider in the gazebo. “She thinks we’re crazy for coming out here today.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked carefully.

“Pretty good. Everything looked fine at her last doctor’s appointment,” Delaney said, sounding like a mother herself. “At least she’s finally being reasonable and trying to stay off her feet some. She even skipped going to church this past Sunday.” Delaney rolled her eyes. “
That
sure never happened before.”

I wanted to ask more, but Delaney was already glancing down the hill toward the lonely headstone she had adopted. Except for some brown leaves rattling in its branches, the giant oak nearby was practically bare now, giving us a clear view of the gravesite. “So you think the sunflower lady will come?” she asked. “Even in this weather?”

“Jeeter says she’s never missed a week as long as he’s been working here.”

Delaney’s face went still. “Whoever’s buried there must have been awful special to her.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, reluctantly tallying in my head how many times I had visited poor Dad. I didn’t even need a whole hand to count the number.

I looked out over the graveyard, restlessly scanning the distance for Kilgore. “If she really doesn’t come till two o’clock like Jeeter said, we’ve got some time to kill before she gets here.”

“That’s good.” Delaney nodded shyly at her backpack. “I brought us lunch.”

“Really?”

“I thought we might get hungry.” Then she paused, hugging her arms across her middle. “Before we eat, though, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

I smiled and crossed my arms too. “What kind of favor?”

“I want you to take me to Babyland.”

Her request was so sudden and strange, I almost laughed out loud. But then I saw how serious Delaney had turned, and I remembered the mesmerized expression on her face from the field trip, when Lottie had first told our class about the corner of the cemetery reserved for children.

“Sure,” I said. “We can go over there right now. The rain’s almost stopped.” She nodded, and we stepped into the light drizzle, leaving her backpack and umbrella behind. Delaney didn’t say anything else until we were standing inside the low iron fence surrounding Babyland.

“Do you mind if we stay here for a few minutes?” she asked.

“ ’Course not.” I turned in the opposite direction so Delaney could wander on her own. My shoes squelched in the wet grass as I weaved up and down the rows of tiny graves. Back in the old days, I used to follow Jeeter through the creaky front gate of Babyland and wait while he tended the plots, making sure not to disturb the little tokens that visitors had left behind. People left all sorts of things—not only flowers, but seashells and teddy bears and birthday cards … sometimes even Barbies and Happy Meal toys. A shivery feeling used to creep into my stomach whenever I bent down for a closer look and read those pitiful inscriptions carved beneath the sculptures of lambs and babies with wings.

I walked a little farther, pausing at a few of the graves I remembered best.

Emma Bennet
Died 1947, Aged 2
So small, so sweet, so soon …

TYLER SMITHINGTON III
May 4, 1970–April 28, 1974
Little Boy Blue Has Gone

I remembered Tyler’s grave because of the blue balloon that someone always used to leave tied to a rock next to the
stone. Blue must have been Tyler’s favorite color. Or maybe blue was just a sign for how sad his family felt.

But there was no balloon today. I looked up and down the rows, suddenly realizing there wasn’t a single gift left on any of the plots anymore. The graves were completely bare except for some bouquets of flowers here and there. Something about the sight of all that emptiness bothered me, and with an ugly suspicion creeping its way into my head, I went back to check the small sign on the front gate. I hadn’t taken the time to stop and read it when we came in. It said:

Only living plants and cut flowers are permitted
as grave decoration. The cemetery warden
reserves the right to direct the removal
of all other inappropriate decorations.

Just what I thought.
Kilgore
. I knew the rule had to be his idea. Mr. Nicknish would never be that coldhearted.

I stepped inside the gate again and looked around for Delaney. At first I thought she might have wandered out the back gate on the other side of Babyland. Then I spotted her, sitting on a marble bench in the far corner, sheltered by a canopy of pine branches. I walked over to join her. Her face was halfway hidden under the hood of her slicker, so it wasn’t till I swiped a puddle off the cold bench and sat down beside her that I realized her cheeks weren’t wet from just the rain. She’d been crying.

I was glad when she started talking first, since I had no
idea what to say. “You remember a while back when you asked me about that calendar hanging in my locker? The one with the red X’s?”

“Uh-huh.”

She sniffed and rubbed her nose with her sleeve. “I told you about how we move all the time, and you thought I might be marking off how many days me and my parents have stayed here. Well, you were right. But I’ve been marking something else too.… I’ve been marking how long Mama’s made it without losing the baby.”

Delaney kept staring out at the miniature graves scattered in front of us. “I lost a little brother about a year and a half ago.” I must have flinched, because she quickly shook her head. “It’s nothing like you losing your dad. My brother was only a couple days old. He was born about a month too early, and something was wrong with his heart. But still … I think about him all the time.”

She heaved a huge sigh. “My parents buried him back in Indiana, where we were before we moved here.” She let out a bitter little laugh. “I can’t even remember the name of the cemetery. I just know it was ugly-looking, with hardly any trees and a highway running past. And nobody there had tombstones. Instead, they had these little plaques set flat in the ground.”

Delaney’s quiet voice rose and picked up speed. “I
hate
the way we always have to move for Daddy’s job, but I was so glad to leave that house of ours in Indiana. There was this little, tiny office that Mama had turned into a baby’s room. She
painted it blue, all by herself, and hung up curtains and this real cute wallpaper border with cowboys on it. So after Will died, it made me feel sick to see that empty room of his with the crib and the rocking chair, just waiting at the end of the hall. I tried keeping the door closed, but it didn’t help.”

I watched another tear slide down Delaney’s pale cheek. “The only thing I was sorry to leave back there was that little grave of Will’s by the highway, even if it
was
ugly.” She wiped her tears off with the heel of her hand, and her voice fell to a whisper. “Who knows when I’ll ever get back there to visit.”

We sat quiet for a minute, listening to the slow drip in the pine branches. I still didn’t know what to say. I kept wishing I had a tissue or a pair of gloves at least. Delaney’s hands looked freezing, damp and tinged with blue.

“Here, do this,” I finally said. I blew on my hands, then rubbed them back and forth on my jeans.

She tried to smile. After she had rubbed for a while, she started talking again. “We’re waiting to pick a name this time, and thank goodness, Mama hasn’t tried to fix up the extra bedroom yet or unpack all the baby stuff. But now she’s further along than last time, and she and Daddy are getting so excited and thinking it’s really going to happen. I want to be happy too, but it’s like I can’t let myself. I start to get my hopes up, and then I remember how things turned out when I felt that way before. So I thought maybe …” She rose from the bench and stood surveying the scene in front of us. “Maybe coming to this place would help me somehow.”

“Has it?” I asked from my spot on the bench. “Helped, I mean?”

Delaney tilted her head to one side. Then she started to nod. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it has,” she marveled. “But I’m not exactly sure why.”

“It’s because you can think here, and the graveyard sort of …” I searched the little tombstones around us for the right way to explain. “… Sort of gives you permission to remember. You don’t have to act all cheerful and pretend like it never happened. That only makes it worse, all that pretending and keeping everything balled up inside.”

Delaney turned and looked down at me, her watery eyes widening. “That’s right,” she said. “You
know
, don’t you?”

I gave a sad little shrug. “I’m still trying to figure it out myself.”

“Your dad,” she said softly. “Is he buried here in Oakland?” “Yep.”

“Will you show me?”

As we walked to the columbarium, Delaney fired out one question after another.

“What kind of father was he?”

“Where did he work?”

“Did you look alike?”

It was surprising how easy it was to answer, how good it felt to walk over to the black granite wall and press my hand against his square after spending so much time trying to avoid it.

“I always wanted him to have a gravestone instead of this wall,” I told Delaney.

“A gravestone would be nice,” she agreed. Then she added wistfully, “But at least you can visit whenever you feel like it.”

She was right. I had more than she did. I stood back and sized up the wall, trying to pretend I was seeing it for the first time. It had finally stopped drizzling for good, and a thin streak of sun was pushing its way through the clouds. Where the light hit, the black granite glinted, and in that minute the size of the wall felt comforting instead of dark and depressing, the way it had before.

After I patted Dad’s stone once more to make up for lost time, we headed back to the gazebo and Delaney laid out our lunch on the glider between us. Fried chicken drumsticks and biscuits and applesauce cake. It was the best food I had ever tasted.

Delaney informed me that I was eating “southern comfort food.” “They’re all my grandma’s recipes,” she explained. “Mama loves to cook. That’s one thing she won’t give up doing, even for a few months.”

I bit into my second piece of cake, working up the nerve to ask about the baby again. I swallowed. “So how many more days are there to mark off on your calendar? Before the baby’s supposed to come?”

“Twenty,” Delaney answered in a heartbeat. “Mama’s due on November eighteenth. The same day as our Adopt-a-Grave Projects are due.” She let out a dry laugh. “Isn’t that something? It’s a big day.”

“That’s soon,” I exclaimed. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Delaney blinked, as if she couldn’t decide whether to
holler with excitement or burst into tears. “I hope so” was all she said.

Then suddenly she stopped, squinting into the distance. “Wait a minute.” She jumped to her feet, sending her chicken bones and cake crumbs flying. “There’s a car.”

I scrambled up to join her. All during lunch we had been keeping an eye on the Raintree grave from our perch on the glider. And with the clouds clearing, I’d been checking over my shoulder for Kilgore. But other than a few squirrels scampering by, there were no signs of life until now.

We stood frozen at the edge of the gazebo watching as an old white station wagon with a noisy muffler chugged slowly along the driveway below. Delaney let out a small gasp when the car pulled to a stop. “That’s got to be her,” she whispered, squeezing my arm as the car door opened and an older woman climbed out.

The woman had silver hair cropped at her chin, and she wore a tan raincoat that looked way too big for her—the kind a man would wear. Then, just as we had been hoping, the woman reached into the backseat of her car and brought out a bouquet of golden flowers. Delaney gasped again. “What should we do now?”

“Let’s give her another minute or two. Then we’ll go down and say hello and see if she’ll tell us anything.” For some reason we were still whispering, although the woman was too far away to hear and she hadn’t noticed us watching from the top of the hill. Now she was making her way slowly across the lawn to the Raintree stone. Even with that rumpled
raincoat almost touching her ankles, her walk appeared stately somehow. She moved like a queen in a procession, cradling the bouquet in her arms.

Finally she reached the grave. We could see her laying the bouquet against the stone, lifting last week’s flowers away, straightening to her full height again.…

“A little longer …,” I said under my breath. From all my years hanging around cemeteries, I knew that some visitors never left a gravesite without bowing their heads to pray. I didn’t want to start things off wrong by interrupting a moment of silence.

“Now?” Delaney asked.

“Okay.” We started down the hill, slowly at first. But by the time we crossed the driveway where the station wagon was parked, the woman had finished at the grave and was heading toward us. I saw Delaney lift her chin and square her shoulders, preparing to introduce herself. I decided to hang back and let her do the talking. It was her project, after all.

“Hello, ma’am?” Delaney called as she stepped from the driveway onto the grass. The lady stopped in her tracks. Her arms tightened around her bouquet of faded sunflowers. “I’m sorry to disturb you. But I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

The lady raised one hand from her bouquet to nervously finger the collar of her raincoat. When she didn’t answer, Delaney charged ahead. “I’m here working on a project for school. My friend and I”—she waved her hand back in my direction—“we go to Plainview Junior High, and for our
American Studies class we’ve been assigned to pick a grave here and find out all we can about it, and well, I chose your grave.” Delaney hurried to correct herself. “I mean, not
your
grave exactly, but the one you just visited.”