We danced slowly, his hands soft on my hips, swaying to a slow song that I didn’t know, but I liked it. It was sweet, with violins, with lyrics about want and yearning and everything that you really needed for a good love song.
A glimmer in the corner caught my eye. I glanced over.
An old woman with beautiful wide brown eyes stood in the doorway to the parlor, her hand outstretched to an elderly man in an orange sweater and brown pants, who took it tightly and kissed her knuckles. They shimmered in that star-glitter way spirits did. Ben glanced in the direction I was looking.
“Can you . . . see her, too?” I whispered in wonder, looking from him to the elderly woman and back again. She had gardening dirt under her nails, and a content smile.
“Now he can give her lilies himself.”
“You can.” I curled my hands tightly around his jacket. Because he could see them. He was one, and now he could see them, and that meant—
It meant I wasn’t alone.
When I looked back toward the couple, they had already melted into a brilliant flash of sunlight, and Heather walked through the doorway, arguing with her husband about their babysitter, as if nothing had been there at all.
“Would you like to go on a walk? In the graveyard?” he asked, drawing me from my thoughts.
I gave him a surprised look. “You’re asking?”
“It’s not night yet so it’s technically not illegal,” he replied dutifully. “And it’s a bit stuffy in here, and besides, I’d like to see your dad.”
“I’d like that, too.” I laced my fingers through his, and we slipped out of the reception and down the front steps of the old and sure house of death. And life.
Life happened in old funeral homes, too.
The cemetery was warm and quiet in the summer evening. The iron gate was already closed, but we knew the perfect little broken bit of wall to climb over, and we held each other’s champagne as we did. My family had been busy, it seemed, since Dad’s funeral. Almost all of the tombstones were washed, gleaming like bone shards sticking up from the hills of bright green grass.
Dad was waiting for us on his favorite hill in the cemetery, in a nondescript shaded plot close to his favorite old oak tree, easily lost in the sea of stones. His marker was pristine and the weeds plucked out. Mom had put fresh orchids in the vase, and I picked out the spoiled leaves with care. His plaque only had a single word—beloved. Mom said it was because there were so many things Dad had been to so many people—“Beloved son, beloved parent, beloved husband, beloved pain in the ass . . .”—but secretly I knew Mom had requested only that word because it was her word to him. Her soft I love you.
Her beloved.
I brushed a ladybug off the plaque.
It still felt like he was here some days, like the world still turned with him in it. And parts of him still were.
Ben crouched down beside the tombstone, and I let him have some privacy as I followed the path up to the bench under the oak tree and sat down. The night had cooled off, and the wind whispered through the trees, and a murder of crows cawed in the distance. I closed my eyes, and I could imagine Dad sitting beside me like he used to, chatting about rates of flower arrangements and the cost of coffins and Carver’s newest chair he built and Alice’s latest chaos. I breathed in the sweet scent of freshly cut grass.
And things were okay.
Ben came over to sit down beside me after a while.
“So, what did y’all talk about?” I asked.
“This and that,” he replied, rubbing his father’s wedding ring on the chain around his neck. “Told him to give Annie a hello. And a thank-you. If she hadn’t asked you to ghostwrite for her . . .”