Not even a bit of poetry, I thought. I admired him for that. For speaking plainly. For avoiding some terrible simile about my eyes, as someone as low as Lucien would have done.

“You are back,” I heard, and then I turned and saw it was Miss Hannah, standing with Miss Annie, both of them looking at me with a friendly weariness.

“Yes,” was all I could say.

In the years since her brother left us for the water, Miss Hannah had grown smaller, so that now she stood at Miss Annie’s shoulder, Her back was still straight, but her eyes were nearly colorless. I had thought her old when I was a girl, but more or less the same age as my mother. Now, I saw she was much older.

“Studies suit you well,” Miss Hannah said, and I reached out to grab her hand.

“I have thought of you and Mr. Ben often,” I said.

It was the wrong thing. Miss Hannah’s face broke, and she lowered her eyes, and Miss Annie looked at me, exasperated. But Miss Hannah held my hand in hers so tight that my fingers tingled, and she would not let go.

“Have you seen?” she said. “He’s here, with us.”

She would not let go. I put my other hand on top of hers, and she clasped her other hand over that, so that we were bound together. She led me away from the table before I could snatch up again my slip of paper from where I’d stuffed it, underneath the pile of empty gloves.

“Here,” she said.

It was a wooden marker. It was painted with the name benjamin smith—the name Miss Hannah had chosen for him and herself. Someone had painted wings on either side, but they were so clumsy they looked like crescent moons.

The church, at least, had given him a prized space, in the middle of the yard between two larger stones. Miss Hannah gazed at the plot as if her brother’s body was really underneath it, as if he could rise up through the grass to be with us.

“I am saving up for stone,” she said. “I had this put up last year.”

She still held my hands in hers. “You are a good sister,” was all I could manage to say, but she did not seem to wish for more. She only wanted me to stand in her fifteen years of grief, beside the play grave of her brother.

It was colder and almost dusk by the time Miss Hannah let my hand go and I could leave the graveyard. By then, the celebration had quieted. Some men and women lingered, eating the last of strawberries that had been set out. A few children, waiting for their parents, slept in a pile underneath one of the tables.