Chapter 5
The deeper I read, the clearer it gets that my husband planned his death more carefully than he ever planned a single day of our marriage.
It's all in the records by the third night, photographed and backed up to an account he doesn't know exists.
The four hundred thousand, moved to Maeve.
The joint account, two years of patient deposits.
The plot, the double stone, the deed made out for two.
And the date under all of it, the one that turns my stomach more than any body ever has, because bodies are honest and this is not: the affair, by every record, began the spring his mother was dying, while Maeve sat the deathbed and I drove the death certificate to the county with my own hands.
I am reading that timeline when the bell rings, and it's Maeve.
She comes into my home like a family friend, because to her she is one, and she's brought a sympathy card and a question about lilies for the memorial, and she has no idea that I know, and watching her not know is its own education.
She is kind. That's the part I can't get past. She held my mother-in-law's hand and made it gentle and she means the card she brought, and she sits at my arrangement table and tells me, with wet eyes, that watching Wade grieve his mother taught her "what real love even looks like," that she'd never seen a man feel so deeply, that I'm lucky.
I pour her a coffee. I can hold the air steady while it says the cruelest possible thing to me.
I pour her coffee and I let her tell me my husband taught her what love looks like, in my house, beside the desk where his grave-for-two is locked in a drawer, and it is the worst cup of coffee I have ever poured in fifteen years of pouring coffee for people on the worst day of their lives.
"He does feel deeply," I say, which is accurate, and lets her hear what she wants.
She tells me one more detail before she goes, leaning in to confide, woman to woman.
She says she's glad his mother got such a peaceful passing, that it brought Wade "real clarity about what he wants his own end to look like," that he's talked to her about it, about not being afraid anymore, about having somewhere to rest that feels like home.
She says it with tenderness, a nurse who has made peace with death, and she has no idea she is describing, to his wife, across his wife's own arrangement table, the grave he bought for the two of them.
I pour her more coffee. I have prepared the bodies of people who were murdered by someone sitting in the front pew, and stood beside that pew, and not flinched.
I can listen to my husband's girlfriend describe his prepaid grave as spiritual growth and ask if she takes sugar.
She hugs me at the door. I let her, because the cold professional part of me, the embalmer's part, wants the whole chain of events laid out before I close.
Then I go down to the prep room, where everyone else's grief gets handled with dignity, and I sit on the stool at the foot of my own steel table among the tools of my trade, and I let myself, for once, be the body nobody prepared.
I cry as I'd never let a family see, ugly, with a start and a stop, because even grieving I keep to a schedule.
Not for Wade. I'm past Wade. I cry for the woman who has given this whole county a good goodbye for fifteen years and was being privately, carefully planned out of her own husband's forever, who comforted the nurse at the graveside, who held him while he wept for the mother whose deathbed he was using to fall in love.
I gave everyone their grief. I was never once allowed my own.
That's the part that undoes me, on the stool at the foot of my own steel table.
Not the grave. That I taught a whole marriage I didn't need anything.
Thirteen years of being the steady one, the one who could handle it, the one you didn't have to worry about because Della always holds up, and somewhere in all that holding up I trained the man beside me to believe I was furniture, load-bearing and silent, the kind of fixture you plan a house around without ever asking how it feels about the renovation.
He didn't plan his death without me because he hated me.
He did it because I'd made myself so easy to overlook that overlooking me felt natural, even at the grave.
I gave everyone permission to lean and nobody permission to look back, and the bill for that came due in granite.
I cry until the schedule's up, and then I stop, because there are two families coming in the morning who'll need my hands steady, and a woman who can prepare the dead can certainly prepare herself.
Reba finds me there, because Reba always knows.
She doesn't say anything for a minute. Then: "You bury this whole county's worst day, Della.
You've done it with your hands steady since your dad died and left you the place.
Every single person in Hartsell has handed you their grief and watched you carry it like it weighed nothing.
" She crouches so we're eye to eye over the cold steel.
"It's about time you stopped burying your own. "
"He didn't just plan a grave without me," I say to Reba, the worst of it finally finding words on the cold prep-room floor.
"He sat at his mother's deathbed, the worst four months of his life, with a woman whose whole job is to make dying gentle, and he decided that gentleness was love, and he started building his exit before his mother had even taken hers.
He used the one event I'd have walked through fire for him on, his mother's death, as the place he fell out of our marriage.
And then he came home and let me hold him, and I did, for two years, not knowing I was comforting a man for a grief he was already spending on somebody else.
" Reba doesn't say anything. She just stays crouched on the floor with me, level, in the one place where I've never once let myself be the body, and after a while she takes my hand like I take a widow's, and holds it, and lets me be held for the first time in fifteen years of holding.
My phone lights on the instrument tray. Quint.
Pulled the work orders on the double stone. Dated, signed, the rush fee, the hold instruction, all of it. Six weeks before his mother's memorial. If this turns into a question of who knew what when, you should have them. They're yours. They were always going to be yours.
I look at it a long time. Reba reads my face.
"That the husband?"
"No," I say, and the no comes out steadier and warmer than I mean it. "That's the man who carved the stone."