…”bench by his grave. Somebody carved something into it. I need to know what it means.”
My grandfather put down the ham fork. He got up from the table, slowly, the way he does now, and walked to the door.
“Come in, ma’am,” he said. “Sit down. You’re shaking.”
Her name was Mrs. Delgado. She sat in my grandmother’s chair at the end of the table, still holding the lilies. Fourteen people watched her. My uncle Roger had put down his wine.
“My son, Danny, died in 1994,” she said. “He was six. Leukemia. We didn’t have money for a plot near the trees, where I wanted him. We had to take the one by the fence. I hated it. Every spring after that, there were white lilies on his grave on his birthday. I never knew who left them. I thought maybe a nurse from the hospital.”
She looked at my grandfather. “And there’s a wooden bench next to his grave that wasn’t there when we buried him. Somebody built it. And carved something on the back. Yesterday, I finally asked the new caretaker who built it. He said, ‘That’d be Abe. He built all the benches by the little ones.'”
My grandfather nodded.
“What does it say?” Roger asked. It was the first thing he’d said since she walked in.
Mrs. Delgado’s voice broke. “It says, ‘Danny. You were six. You were loved. Somebody will always come.'”
The room was silent. My grandmother was crying into her napkin.
“How many?” Roger asked my grandfather. “How many benches?”
Grandpa thought about it. “Thirty-one,” he said. “One for every child I buried. I build them in the garage in the winter.”
“And the lilies?”
“Thirty-one,” he said again. “On their birthdays. I keep a list in my truck.”
Nobody at the table had known. Not my grandmother. Not my mom. Not one of us.
Mrs. Delgado took his hand. “Why?” she said. “Why would you do all that, for children you didn’t know?”
My grandfather looked at the lilies in her lap. “Because the hardest part of my job isn’t the digging, ma’am,” he said. “It’s when everyone goes home, and it’s just the child and me. I wanted them to know somebody would keep coming.”
Roger got up from the table and went outside. I found him later, sitting on the porch steps in the cold.
“I sell plots,” he said, without looking at me. “I call it a growth market. I’ve never once stood at one of those graves after everyone left.”
The next spring, my uncle Roger drove my grandfather to St. Michael’s on every one of the thirty-one birthdays. He carried the lilies. He helped sand the new benches in the garage. Grandpa’s hands shake too much now to carve. Roger does the lettering.
Mrs. Delgado comes to Easter dinner now. She brings lilies. My grandfather always takes one home to put on the windowsill in the garage, where he builds the benches.
