“Are all of the plots here sold?”
“No, not all of ’em. But most. This is an old cemetery, you know.”
“What about this one?”
An empty stretch of grass waits next to my mother’s grave, a so-far-unclaimed plot.
“What? Right here?”
“Yes, right here.”
“These are good spots. Most been bought a long time back. I can tell you this one was bought over forty years ago. Bought and paid for by—” The man motions at my mother’s grave and stops himself, embarrassed. “I don’t know if the one next to ’ers been bought,” he replies. “Have to check.”
“Could you do that?”
“What? Right now?”
My silence is my reply. A gust of wind surges over the ridge, thick with the scent of impending rain, and the man’s face sours. He glances back at the open grave ruefully.
“All right, I s’pose,” he huffs, hoisting the shovel back onto his shoulder. “I’ll check.”
The man trudges toward the cemetery’s front gate, disappearing down the path as Martin did.
I am alone as the first raindrops fall, landing softly on my mother’s coffin and rolling lazily down to the dirt. I was wrong. The rain has come. Not a downpour or a deluge. Just a simple rain falling in the only direction it has to go.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to my parents for their unflagging support and encouragement. Thanks is also due to my friends—Ruth Foxe Blader, Grace Tseng, Ann Rollert, Heather and Gavin Frater, Amy and Brad Miller, Alex Parsons, Alice Dickens, Sarah Gegenheimer, Anne Engelhardt, Sue Zwick, Maureen Squillace, Matthew Vaeth, Barbara Sheffer, and the Kapustik family.
I would also especially like to thank Jonathan Pecarsky, my literary agent, as well as my editor, Clair Wachtel.
I am deeply grateful to James Michener and the Copernicus Society of America for their grant, without which this book would not have been possible.
About the Author
BRETT ELLEN BLOCK is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of East Anglia’s fiction writing program in England. She won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her debut collection of stories, Destination Known, and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
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ALSO BY BRETT ELLEN BLOCK
Destination Known: Stories
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE GRAVE OF GOD’S DAUGHTER. Copyright © 2004 by Brett Ellen Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition June 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-191590-1
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Brett Ellen Block
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Grave of God's Daughter Page 25