The name in the ledger was my grandmother’s sister. Died November 1971, aged forty-four. I have never heard of her. My mother has never heard of her. There is no photograph of her in any album in that family and my grandmother lived until 2003 and mentioned a sister exactly zero times in eighty-one years — and the dates say she was alive until I was two, and buried four plots from where everyone thought she was, and my grandmother chose her own plot in 1988 and picked the one immediately behind it.
The groundskeeper’s finger was on that line because the ledger has a second column. Next of kin, 1971: my grandmother, signed, with an address I recognized as the house my mother grew up in. She’d arranged the burial. She’d paid for the stone. She’d stood in that section on a November afternoon and then gone home and, as far as anyone living can tell, never said the woman’s name out loud again.
We found the reason in the county records in August, and I’m going to leave most of it out because two of the people involved are still alive. What I’ll say is that there was a hospital in 1971 and there was a child in 1954, and the arithmetic on that second date is the arithmetic that keeps me up. My mother is seventy-four. She has spent nine months deciding whether she wants a test done and I have not offered one opinion about it.
I still go in May. I put flowers on both now, four plots apart, which is the only thing I’ve been able to think of that isn’t a decision. The groundskeeper told me in the office that he’d found the error in 2019 and had said nothing for six years because he’d watched me come every May and hadn’t been able to work out whether telling me was a kindness. I asked him what changed. He said he was retiring in June and he wasn’t going to hand it to the next man.
