…”Almost time. Remember: tell her before the 14th. Tell her everything.” I sat down on the wet grass. Then I noticed the stone was wider than it looked from the front. I walked around to the back. There was another name carved there. David Thomas Hart. My husband’s birth date. And a second date, already carved. The 14th of next month. With a question mark.
I drove home without remembering the road. David was making lunch in the kitchen. I put the card on the counter in front of him. He looked at it. Then he turned off the stove and sat down.
“Pancreatic,” he said. “Stage four. They found it in June. The fourteenth is my last scan. The doctor said if it’s spread, it’s weeks. Maybe less.” He said it the way he says everything, gently, carefully, like he was handing me something breakable.
“Every day at lunch I go there and practice telling you,” he said. “I sit on the bench and say it out loud. I couldn’t get past the first sentence.” He looked at the AirTag I’d set on the counter. “I put that in your purse because I’m scared. Not that you’ll lose it. That I’ll need you, and I won’t know where you are.”
I asked why my name was on the front. He smiled for the first time. “Because I wanted to be the one behind you. Like always. I put the date as a question mark because I’m still hoping.”
The scan on the fourteenth came back better than anyone expected. The tumor had shrunk. He’s in treatment now. We don’t know how long we have. Nobody does.
But every day at 12:40, I drive with him to St. Mary’s. We sit on the bench together and eat lunch in front of the gray stone. We don’t practice anything anymore. We just talk. And last week, David took a marker out of his pocket and very carefully, very slowly, crossed out the question mark.
