Michael looked at her in disbelief. “You never told me that.”
“You were busy being born,” she replied dryly.
To Michael’s astonishment, June laughed.
Then June said, “He once spent forty-five minutes rearranging canned soup in our pantry because labels had to face the same direction.” Michael laughed this time before he could stop himself. Eleanor rolled her eyes toward heaven. “That sounds like Thomas,” she said, and there it was again—that subtle, almost accidental common ground not in who they had been to him but in who he had been to them.
They stayed only fifteen minutes.
No scene unfolded. No licenses emerged. At one point Michael heard the bagpipes and remembered the purse half-open under last year’s sun, the terrible public intimacy of grief demanding credentials. He looked at the two women beside him and felt not triumph but relief. Peace, he was learning, is usually too untidy for triumph.
As they turned to leave, Eleanor touched the top of the headstone once more.
“Goodbye, Tom,” she said. Then she added, almost under her breath, “You left a mess.” June heard it anyway. Instead of flinching, she answered softly, “He did.” It was perhaps the most honest epitaph any of them could give.