The cemetery was four hours away, in a town my husband had never mentioned. The woman at the office pulled up the record and asked whether I was family. I said I was his widow. She looked at the screen, then at me, and said the stone had been paid for in 2007. I asked who had paid for it. She hesitated before telling me it had been purchased under my husband’s name — but the person buried there wasn’t a relative listed anywhere in his records. I asked what the inscription said. She turned the monitor toward me, and I stopped breathing when I saw the same last name.
There were two names on the stone. A woman’s, and a child’s. The dates were decades apart, but the woman’s death was only three weeks before my husband and I got married. I called the barber from the parking lot and asked him what he’d meant by “once for each side.” He went quiet. Then he said, “Your husband told me never to tell you unless you found that stone yourself.” I asked what the other side was. He said there was another cemetery, closer to home, and my husband had been visiting both places every year on the same Thursday. Then he gave me an address and told me not to call him again.
I drove there before I could change my mind. The cemetery was smaller, almost hidden behind an old church. The caretaker found the grave immediately because, according to him, my husband had been paying for its upkeep for nineteen years. I asked who was buried there. He looked at the name and said, “His first wife.” I told him my husband had never been married before me. He stared at me for a long moment and then said, “Ma’am, that’s what he told us too. But every year, he brought flowers for her and for the child beside her.” The child had my husband’s surname. And the date on the child’s stone was the year before my husband was born…
