The Grave She Hadn't Visited

She had not gone to the cemetery after the funeral. She told herself, at the time, that it was because of the leave forms and the drive and the practicalities of grief, and she had believed it well enough to get through March, April, most of May.

The truth, she understood now, idling at the cemetery gates with the engine running, was that she hadn't gone because a grave doesn't argue back, and some part of Mara had still been furious enough at her mother to need the possibility of an argument.

Carol Vance's headstone was plain granite, the kind Carol herself would have chosen for its lack of fuss. Beloved wife and mother, it said, which struck Mara, standing over it with the box under her arm, as either the truest or the least true sentence available, depending entirely on which twenty minutes of her mother's life you asked about.

"I know about the girl," Mara said, to granite, to grass, to the specific nothing that a grave gives back. "I know about Edwin. I know you wanted to go to Beirut with a camera. I'm starting to think I never actually knew you at all, and I'm furious that I only started trying after you couldn't try back."

The wind did what wind does, which is nothing, on cue, ever, no matter how badly a scene calls for it.

"I'm not finishing this because the note told me to," Mara said, quieter. "I want you to know that. I'm finishing it because somewhere around Wyoming I stopped delivering your apologies and started needing to understand my own mother, and it turns out those were never two different errands. They were the same one the whole time."

She left no letter here — there was none addressed to a grave — but she left the road atlas open on the hood for a moment, Larkspur circled twice in blue ballpoint, before she folded it shut and got back in the car, because some conversations end not with an answer but simply with a woman deciding she has said enough for one afternoon.