I smiled a little. My chest hurt, and I had to cough, and I did, and Mom heard the cold.

“You sick, gwus?” she said.

“I’m all right,” I said. “A cold.”

“That don’t sound good,” Frick said. He turned to Mom. “You want to finish cooking this? I’ll make him tea.”

Frick mixed honey and lemon juice in a mug with hot water. “When you finish it,” Frick said, “don’t cough. Just hold it down, let the tea settle.”

I sipped the tea while Frick set the table.

At some point during breakfast, Mom said, “Today. After we eat.”

When we finished, both Mom and Frick cleared the table, and Mom told me to get ready. I put on jeans and a T-shirt. I felt hot.

“Put a jacket on,” Mom told me before we left the house.

I followed her and Frick out the back door and into the day and onto the briny asphalt. I went to the car, but Mom said no, that we were walking there.

We walked to the end of the road together, and then onto the bumpy brown path.

“I don’t go up there often,” Mom said.

“Where?” Frick said.

“The graveyard,” Mom said.

Frick stopped walking. “Do you have something to show me?” he said, and he spit. “Or does this have something to do with what I said, about ripping that headstone out? You know,” he said, pointing at her, “you would bring this shit back up. You wouldn’t leave it be. You want me to say I’m sorry? Is that it? Come on, now.”

“No,” Mom said. “Well, maybe. I’m trying to show you that I know what loss feels like.”

I was hot, burning—couldn’t speak on the road to the graveyard.

Mom sat on a fallen oak, the river thawing at her back. She looked at Frick and told him a story I never knew existed. I listened as best I could, the heat of my body radiating so hard that it took my attention. It was like my vision was narrowed, a pinhole looking outward at the passing of experience.

I heard her say there should have been two, that they were healthy for the whole time, but after he, me, after he came out, the other one, the other one wasn’t whole, was a tumor with hair and teeth sprouting out.

Frick had taken off his jacket and put it over my shoulders, which reminded me I was there, with them.

“The tumor spread throughout me,” Mom said. “That’s what they said, the doctors—he’d spread throughout me.” Mom laughed. “And my mother, my mother wouldn’t let the doctors keep the tumor. Her convenient Indian came out, said it was improper to dispose of it the way they were going to. A few weeks after the hysterectomy, my mother and I came up here. The church wouldn’t bury the child, so we did. The headstone was already there. Maybe that’s why I go up there sometimes, to see if it’s still there, to make sure no one other than him has been buried under it. And maybe that’s why what you said upset me.”