Chapter 3
The stone yard at Birch Monuments has its bay door rolled halfway up when I arrive at seven, and I'm there because I have a memorial to order a guest book for and because if I stay in my own home one more hour I'll start arranging flowers for a service I haven't admitted yet is my own marriage.
Quint Birch has cut every stone Brandt Funeral Home has set for six years.
He's a big, deliberate man, stone dust worked permanently into the lines of his hands, and he's bent over a slab with a pencil and a straightedge laying out a name when I come in, and he doesn't look up right away, because Quint finishes a line before he stops, which is the kind of care a family hopes for in the man carving their mother's name.
"Brandt," he says, when the line's done. He sets the pencil down with the same care he gives everything. "You don't usually come yourself. You send Reba."
"I needed the air."
He looks at me then, and there's nothing on his face but attention, which from this man is a great deal, because Quint spends his days at the edge of other people's worst moments and has learned not to intrude on a grief that isn't his.
"Your last stone," he says. "The Hadley boy.
The lettering." He shakes his head once.
"Most of what I cut, the family picks a font off a sheet and never thinks about it again.
You came back twice to get the spacing of that child's name right.
That was the only stone I cut all month that somebody actually grieved over. "
The words hit a place I keep sealed, and I have to look at the slab on his bench to get my face back, because I did go back twice for the Hadley boy, and nobody noticed, and a man who carves names for a living just told me he noticed.
That's the difference, standing in a stone yard at seven in the morning, that I won't be able to unsee later.
Wade has told me I'm wonderful at my job a thousand times, always to an audience, always as a setup for what he wanted said about himself, my wife runs the whole funeral home, can you believe it, she's a saint.
He praised the institution of me. He never once noticed the spacing of a child's name.
And a reserved man who hauls granite, who has no reason to flatter the undertaker and nothing to sell her at seven a.m., watched me grieve over a stranger's lettering and remembered it a month later.
I have spent thirteen years married to a man who admired me out loud and never saw me, and I am discovering, two minutes into a conversation about headstones, that there is another kind of man entirely, the kind who says nothing and sees everything, and I did not know, until right now, that I had been starving for the second kind.
"I do the lettering myself," I say. "The families don't always know to ask. But the name is the last word most people get. It should be right."
"It should." He wipes his hands on the cloth at his belt, slow.
"I cut a double last month. Rush order, premium granite, for a plot out at Birch Hill.
Two full names, same surname, which I thought was odd because one of them was a woman I didn't know.
" He reports it like a yield, no angle in it, no idea he's handing me a knife.
"It's finished, but it isn't set yet. Special instruction was to hold placement until after the memorial.
" He looks at me, and something in my face must finally reach him, because the stillness in him deepens.
"Wade Sutter and Maeve Sutter. That was the order.
" A pause, careful as a chisel. "Brandt.
Why does that name just do that to your face? "
I look at this large, careful man who notices the spacing of a dead child's name, who has already, without knowing it, cut my husband's future grave with another woman wearing my name beside him, and who is the only person in Hartsell to say both those names to me out loud and then wait, with his whole attention, to find out why they hurt.
"Because one of those names is my husband's," I say. "And the other one isn't mine."
The yard goes silent, just the tick of cooling granite and a sparrow somewhere in the rafters.
Quint Birch looks at me for a long moment, and then he makes the one choice that tells me everything I will need to know about him later.
He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't say he's sorry.
He reaches over to his work bench, pulls the order book toward him, opens it to a dated page, and turns it so I can read it.
"Then you should have this," he says. "The order's dated six weeks ago.
He paid the rush fee to have it ready by the memorial, then paid extra to hold the setting until after the service.
" His jaw works once. "I cut a man's future beside his girlfriend's and put your married name on her because he told me to.
The date's right there. Whatever you need it for, it's yours. "
Six weeks ago. Wade ordered his eternity with Maeve Renwick six weeks ago, paid extra to have her carved as Maeve Sutter, ready to be placed after his mother's memorial, and then came to my prep-room door with a deli sandwich and asked me to honor his mother right.
I close the order book gently and look at the only honest man in the county who deals in last words.
He doesn't ask the questions other people would ask, the how-long and the are-you-sure and the what-will-you-do.
He lets the order book sit open between us and goes back to laying out the name he was carving when I came in, and after a minute he says, not looking up from the straightedge, "A stone's the most honest work I make.
You can't argue with it. You can't soften it for the family.
It says the years a person got and the name they were and that's all, and it has to stand, because it's going to stay there in the weather long after everybody who'd lie about it is gone.
" He sets the pencil down. "He hid his in granite because he thought it was the one place you'd never look.
But a grave is just a fact that hasn't happened yet, and facts are your whole business.
" He finally looks at me. "He picked the most permanent way in the world to be a coward.
It's going to stand out there reading Wade Sutter and Maeve Sutter in good granite for a hundred years, and there's nothing he can do about that now, because I cut it deep and I cut it right. "
"What time do you close?" I say. "I'm going to need to come back. I have a lot of reading to do, and you're the only person in this whole business who's been straight with me this week."