by Jan Burke
“Stop here,” I said. “Pull over to the right.”
Now what? Trees, I remembered. Between four trees. I looked out over the cemetery and saw trees everywhere. At least eight of them nearby. I took a deep breath and got out of the car.
I began walking with a show of purpose, looking down at the rows of headstones, trying, as I always did on my few visits here, not to step on anybody. It wasn’t really possible, but I tried. I kept hoping that some unusual name or a special military headstone would jog my memory, tell me I was in the right place. I looked up and tried to recall what the trees near my parents’ graves looked like. I tried to find a new grave— there were four of them, all fairly far apart. One was near a tree and a bench, so I could rule that one out. But it could be any of the others. I chose the nearest one and, feeling Frank’s eyes on me, walked with determined steps toward it.
Wrong grave.
I stood still, feeling a sudden overwhelming sense of shame.
Frank, misunderstanding the cause of my upset, put an arm around my shoulders. I saw him read the nearest headstones, saw his look of puzzlement when he realized that they were Cambodian names.
“I don’t know these people,” I said, then added, “I also don’t know where my parents are buried. I never come out here.”
He didn’t say anything, but he pulled me closer.
“I thought I could find them,” I said. “I’ve never felt what some people feel when they visit graves—what Barbara feels. She feels closer to my mother when she’s here. But even when we were younger, when my father used to bring us here to put flowers on my mother’s grave, I would wander off over there, across the road.” I pointed to the statue. “I’d read the children’s tombstones.”
“We can’t be too far away, then,” he said. “It has to be near one of the new graves, right?”
I nodded.
He kept his arm around me as we walked. We stopped at the next nearest new grave, but my parents’ graves weren’t there, either. As we headed for the third one, a caretaker’s truck pulled up. The driver, a gnarled old man, wore a straw hat, jeans and a light-green cotton shirt, work gloves and boots. He took a rake from the back of the truck and headed toward one of the trees. Seeing us, he asked, “You need help?”
“Yes,” Frank answered before I could politely refuse. “Kelly?”
“Oh, sure. You one of Mary Kelly’s nephews?”
Frank smiled. “No, only by marriage.”
“I’m her grandniece,” I answered. “You know her?”
“Sure.” He studied me for a minute. “You ain’t the one she calls Prissy Pants.”
Frank laughed. There were reasons he got along well with my great-aunt.
“You must be Irene,” the caretaker went on. “She’s told me a lot about you. You’re the reporter, right?”
“Yes. And this is my husband, Frank.”
“A cop, right?”
“Yes,” I said, “but how do you know—”
“Oh, I’ve known Mary for years. We both go to St. Matthew’s and a lot of her family is buried here. Most Sundays I see her and we talk for a while after Mass. Your aunt is quite a lady. You’re headed the wrong way,” he added, and steered us toward the grave I had first ruled out, near the bench and tree.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Oh, forgive me. No manners on me today. I’m Sean Grady,” he said, tipping his hat. “I knew your grandfather, too. Daniel Kelly was a fine man. A fine man. The Kellys own most of the plots in this section, you know. Or Mary does, anyway.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, she does. She has a way about her, that one.” He laughed. “I put this bench in here for her, so she’d have a place to sit when she comes to visit. She thanked me, then asked me to plant a tree so she could sit in the shade!”
“She’s been trying to reach you, hasn’t she?” Frank asked.
“Yes, we’ve been playing phone tag for the last few days,” I said. “This must be why she called.” Worried, I tried to think of any relatives on the Kelly side of my family who might have died—but the other Kellys lived out of state, or in Ireland. Why would any of them want to be buried in Las Piernas?
There were newly cut flowers on my parents’ grave; a dozen red roses, carefully arranged in the brass vase that fit into my mother’s side of the grave, probably left there by my sister. My mother would have loved them. Frank and Mr. Grady stood quietly beside me. My parents’ headstone looked odd, and I quickly realized why: the side bearing my mother’s name was polished, but my father’s side was covered with a layer of dust. More than dust, really—it was dirty. There was even a bird dropping on it.
“That bitch,” I said, to Mr. Grady’s apparent shock.
“Barbara only cleaned off your mother’s side?” Frank asked.
“Yes,” I said, so angry I could hardly manage that one word. I started looking through my purse for a tissue, but everything was blurry, including the one, big fat tear that I felt rolling unattractively off the end of my nose.
Frank knelt down, not seeming to notice that he was probably going to have grass stains on his suit pants, and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He started cleaning off my father’s side of the stone. I knelt next to him, and soon old Mr. Grady was there, too, using a big red cloth, all three of us polishing the smooth marble.
“We need some water,” Mr. Grady said, getting to his feet.
Frank worked the metal vase free from my father’s grave. “Is there a faucet nearby?” he asked Mr. Grady.
Mr. Grady pointed one out, and Frank left to fill the vase.
I moved to the bench, tried to pull myself back together. I made myself focus on the new grave, on the seams of earth between rectangles of newly placed sod. I silently debated whether or not I should do anything on Barbara’s behalf. Ever.
“Do you know whose grave this is, Mr. Grady? The one next to my mother’s?”
He shook his head. “No, no, I don’t. I wasn’t here the day of the funeral—I’m off on Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and I think this one was Wednesday. Must be somebody your great-aunt Mary knows, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She owns several plots here. Nobody could have been buried next to your folks without her say-so.”
Frank came back and splashed the headstone with a little water. The rest of the dirt came off, and with a little more water, the stone cleaned up nicely. Frank put the vase back in its holder, water still in it. He reached toward the roses, then hesitated, looking at me.
“Do you think she’d mind?” he asked.
“My mother?”
“Yes.”
I smiled. “No, she wouldn’t mind. She was always generous.”
He carefully pulled three of the roses from the vase on my mother’s grave.
I tried to tell myself, on the way home, that my father was past feeling any slights from Barbara, that even when he was alive, he had an understanding of her habit of distancing herself from him, an understanding I could never share.
“You going to see your aunt Mary?” Frank asked.
“You want to come along if I do?”
“Of course. Wouldn’t miss it.”
I looked at the muddy spots on his knees. “Frank?”
“Hmm.”
“Thanks.”
He smiled, looking more content than he had in many days.
3
“No, not one of the Kellys,” Aunt Mary said when I called her. “But some things should be discussed face-to-face, not over the phone. Besides, I’ve baked an apple pie and I don’t want to sit here and eat it all by myself. Frank likes apple pie, doesn’t he? Of course he does. Come over to my house after you’ve had your supper. See you then.”
She hung up before I could accept or refuse the invitation or confirm that yes, Frank liked apple pie.
We pulled into the driveway of her small Craftsman-style home, parking behind her red ‘68 Mustang conve
rtible. Aunt Mary is the original owner of both the car and the house.
Her house is small but it sits on a large lot. Her garden was in bloom, and although it was too dark to see the honeysuckle and roses and jasmine, we savored the combination of their sweet and spicy fragrances as we walked to the front door. I glanced at my watch before knocking. It was nine o’clock. For some people just over eighty years old, it might have been a little late to begin an evening’s visit, but Mary has always been a night owl. As far as Mary’s circadian rhythms were concerned, we had arrived at the equivalent of four o’clock in the afternoon.
When she answered our knock, a different fragrance greeted us, that of hot apple pie. “Come on in, come on in,” she said, taking an apron off.
Despite the fact that she loves to bake, she has always been slender.
That night she was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes. Her hair was in a single neat, thick gray braid, and she was wearing her favorite jewelry—a squash-blossom necklace and turquoise-and-silver earrings.
She carelessly set the apron aside and gave me a big hug as I walked in. Frank got a hug, too, but she held on to him as she stepped back and looked him over. She made a clucking noise and said, “Irene, you are starving my favorite nephew.”
“No, she’s not—” he began, but she interrupted.
“Pie will be ready in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “Have a seat in here. Too hot in the kitchen.”
“I thought you said the pie was already made,” I said.
“Well, maybe I did, but what I meant to say was that if you’d come over, I’d make one.”
“But you must have had the ingredients on hand,” I persisted.
“Yes, Miss Smarty, I did. And since I know how that mind of yours works, yes, I knew that sooner or later you would be coming by, and if you were—well, now, I couldn’t have you bring this big fellow and not offer him anything to eat, now could I? Have a seat, I said.”
We sat.
“Going to extremes, aren’t you?” I said.
“What? Making an apple pie?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“No wonder you’re off your feed, Frank. Pushy and uppity, isn’t she? Here I am, offering my hospitality, and she wants to proceed at her pace, do things her way.”
“Can’t imagine where she gets that from,” Frank said.
She looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed. “Ah, you should come to see me more often, you two. Can I get either one of you something to drink?”
With that she took charge again, and warned off, I bided my time. She focused her attentions on Frank, asking him about his plans for his summer garden, which took the two of them into a rather detailed discussion of planting methods for vegetable gardens. Apparently, there would be no talk of cemeteries until she was good and ready to bring the subject up. I knew her well enough not to try to coax it out of her. If Mary had decided that we owed her three or four visits before she would tell me who was buried next to my mother, that’s how long I’d have to wait.
As it turned out, she only held off telling me until after Frank had polished off two pieces of apple pie with double scoops of vanilla ice cream on them. She wasn’t stingy with my serving, but my patience was wearing thin, and after the day I’d had, my appetite wasn’t up to par. She noticed.
“No need to pout,” she said. “He’s my favorite nephew because you’re my favorite niece.”
I didn’t try to hide my skepticism.
“My favorite in California,” she amended. Since most of her other nephews and nieces live in Ireland, and only another handful live in other states, this was not the signal honor it may seem.
“Mr. Grady tells me you refer to your only other California niece as ‘Prissy Pants,”“ I said, ”so forgive me if I fail to feel puffed up with flattery.“
“Well, she is a Prissy Pants. And I’m damned tired of her disrespect to her father’s memory.”
“Is anyone buried in that new grave? Or did you just have Mr. Grady and his friends hack up the ground to upset Barbara?”
“Of course someone is buried there. And when I tell you who it is, you’ll be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting such a thing.”
I waited.
“You don’t even have a guess, do you?” she said.
“Tell me something, Aunt Mary. If you go to that cemetery often enough to be on a buddy-buddy basis with the groundskeeper—”
“Mr. Grady is a member of my parish—”
“I’ll bet none of the other members of the parish get benches and trees near their dearly beloveds’ final resting places.”
“Hmph.”
“If you’re there so often,” I went on, “why haven’t you cleaned my father’s side of the stone?”
“Ha! You think I haven’t? You think there was seven years’ worth of bird crap on that stone when you got there today?”
That hurt, but I said, “It does rain once in a while.”
“Rain!” She rose to her feet. “Rain! Oh, my poor nephew Patrick, with nobody to remember him but these two—”
“Mary,” Frank said, quietly but firmly.
She sat down and crossed her arms over her chest. She sighed. “You’re right, Frank. I’m going about this all wrong. All wrong. Irene, I apologize.”
“Me, too,” I said. “On more than one count. You’re right, Mary, I should go out there more often—”
Mary waved a hand in dismissal. “I know why you don’t, and it’s all okay by me, Irene. I need your help, and I should have just asked. I guess I just wondered how long it would take your sister to get curious about that grave.”
“Not long. You said you need my help—does it have something to do with the grave?”
“Yes. Do you remember your cousin Travis?”
I frowned, then shook my head. “If I’ve met a Travis Kelly—”
“Not Kelly. Maguire.”
My eyes widened. “You mean—”
“Yes,” she said. “Your mother’s nephew.”
“He died?” I asked, shocked. The last time I had seen Travis, he was an infant.
“No, his mother died.”
“His mother? Not…”
She nodded. “Your mother’s sister, Briana.”
It was a name I had not heard in over a dozen years. Still, I could feel my face turning red when she mentioned it.
Frank straightened in his chair, his interest piqued.
“I buried her next to your mother,” Aunt Mary said. “I was trying to right a wrong. Your father was a good man—please understand, I’m not denying that on most counts he was a very good man, Irene. But he was wrong to treat Briana the way he did. The least the Kelly family could provide her was a place to rest her bones.”
“I haven’t heard anything about Briana or Travis in so long…”
Mary snorted. “Of course not. Your father made sure of that, didn’t he?”
I shook my head. “I could have tried to look her up after Dad died. I’m ashamed to say I’d forgotten all about her.”
“I’m confused,” Frank said.
“The Maguires are my mother’s family,” I said. “Most of them are in Kansas. My mother is one of three sisters. I never knew the oldest one, Maggie. Maggie died before I was born. But the other two—my mother, Maureen Maguire, and her sister, Briana—came out to California.”
“Go on,” Mary said, “tell him the rest.”
“My mother married my father, Patrick Kelly, and Barbara and I were born. When we were little, we saw Briana fairly often. Barbara and I were very fond of her.”
“You were much closer to her than Barbara was,” Mary said.
I shrugged. “I suppose that’s true.”
“It’s undoubtedly true.”
“So what happened?” Frank asked.
“She got married, and my father never liked her husband.”
“To put it mildly,” Aunt Mary grumbled.