“Well, that much is true. Whenever I ask you what you want to do, you say you don’t know.”
“A lot of people don’t know, at my age. That’s why they’re living with their parents.”
“They know what they’re interested in.”
“I actually want to be a firefighter,” he said.
“It’s an honorable profession.”
“But I can’t, because I’m a felon.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So I guess I’ll just work at Target the rest of my life if I can get hired there.”
“This is going nowhere. I don’t want to fight with you. We didn’t come here for that.”
As I walked over to gently place the roses on the grave through the fence, Stefan suddenly pointed out that a chunk of the headstone had apparently been broken off and simply set back in place. When he reached in to touch it, the piece fell to the ground. “They’re going to think I did this,” he said.
“No one will think that,” I told him. “I can’t imagine how it happened. We’ll let the caretaker know.” I knelt down, and then, to my surprise, I couldn’t straighten up. Leaning on the fence, I began to cry, hard. I had never cried for Belinda, in part because her death engendered so much shock and horror that it shouldered grief aside. Time, however, had done its work, and I thought of her picking Stefan up to play tennis or go biking when he, of course, was indulging his lifelong romance with sleep. I could hear her voice, loud and deep for such a tiny thing, as she stood throwing gravel from my rose garden at Stefan’s second-floor window and calling, “Get up, you’re wasting your life!”
“Whatever you did, and whatever she did,” I said, “she loved you, and she wouldn’t have wanted you to waste your life. That sounds like a guilt trip, but it’s true.”
Stefan leaned down and half lifted me up, putting his arm around me and awkwardly shushing me, as I had shushed him hundreds of times in our life together. Huddled, we walked past the gawkers, back toward the car. When I turned to look back, the figure in the hoodie was standing under a tree watching us, as still as one of the monuments. With a jerk, I stumbled forward quicker, virtually hauling Stefan along. “Get in and lock the doors,” I told him as I took the driver’s seat.
As we pulled out, a sharp wind burst out of nowhere. Stefan huddled inside against the passenger door and the gust swept petals everywhere and the birds shrieked in the trees.
After that morning, Stefan seemed to sleep most of the rest of the week. Then one night he knocked at my bedroom door and said, “Mom, I’m sorry about the cemetery. I was so rude to you.”
I didn’t assure him that it was okay. I just accepted his apology.
In due course, Stefan’s surgeon announced he was pleased with the progress of his eye repair. It would still be some weeks before its complete functionality could be assessed. Until then, Stefan would continue to wear a patch. For the next six weeks at least, he was still to avoid heavy lifting, like bench pressing （or humping lumber, although that was no longer on the table）。 But he could return to some type of ordinary work.
It was still early in June when Stefan spotted an ad for a job as a janitor at the newly completed Orthodox church, our parish church, a lavish structure five years in the planning and construction. He called right away and arranged to stop by within the hour. But once he was there, Reverend Kanelos balked, at least at first, perhaps using Stefan’s eye patch as an excuse. He templed his fingers and said there were so many factors to consider, which sounded like him. Stefan didn’t tell me the next part, but I had gone to high school with the reverend’s now wife Vivian who later told me that Stefan spoke up for himself: “Father, this is not just a church, this is my church. If my church will not forgive me, who will forgive me?”
Challenged to the foundations of his ministry, the priest relented. He had known Stefan since he baptized him twenty years ago; there was no retreat.
Stefan worked his janitorial duties alone at first and just part-time. He cleaned the church and took pleasure in massaging beeswax into the newly carved benches and using an extended pole to polish the extravagant stained glass of St. John the Wonderworker with vinegar and water. But he grew transfixed as he watched the local florist Fancy’s Florals wheel in urns and pots of seasonal flowers. Stefan told Father Kanelos, “I can do the floral arrangements for you for less money.” He had no idea what the church was paying Fancy’s Florals; he just assumed he could do it cheaper, even if he had to scavenge flowers from the dump behind University Hospital to start. He knew that’s where patients’ flowers were discarded. When he was in rehab at Our Lady Queen of the Universe Hospital in Black Creek before he was incarcerated, he spent hours gazing through the narrow, barred windows at all the mounds of flowers and plants left behind by hospital visitors; many of the arrangements still lush, healthy, extravagantly potted. Either hospital personnel already had their fill or some bizarre policy was in place to prevent workers from taking the stuff home. Sardonically, I suggested he might peruse the funeral homes as well; but he told me that the funeral homes donated their flowers to the hospitals.