“You mean from his first family,” June snapped over the phone one afternoon in April.
Eleanor, when told what June had said, replied, “No, I mean from his actual family.” Michael ended the call abruptly and drove around the outer belt for forty minutes before going home, because motion sometimes felt easier than speech.
By the time Memorial Day approached, everyone had a plan that ignored the others’ plans.
Eleanor intended to arrive early, before crowds gathered, place peonies because they had been Thomas’s mother’s favorite, and have a private conversation with the man she still alternately loved and prosecuted in her mind. June intended to come later with fresh lilies and a folded note she did not yet know whether she could bear to leave. Michael intended to bring both women at different times and clearly had not learned much from history.
He discovered the overlap at 9:12 a.m. when June texted, At the cemetery. Lot is packed. See you near Section C? while Eleanor was already beside him in the passenger seat saying, “Make sure you don’t park us by the bus unloading area.”
Michael felt his stomach drop.
He considered lying to one of them, redirecting, or turning around. He did none of those things, partly because the roads were already crowded with cars entering the cemetery grounds and partly because some part of him had become fatalistic. If there was going to be a reckoning, perhaps better under daylight and flags than through another month of indirect sniper fire.
Which was how he ended up watching the two women reach Thomas’s grave at the same moment.