“What is it?” said Nancy.

“We have to drive there,” said Mel.

“How far?” said the nurse.

The graveyard was way down 93 from the Citgo, past Mel’s house, then left on the Stringer Road, across from the cornfield at the Gainey Crossing. They rode in Nancy’s truck, the nurse and Nancy in the front, and Mel in the back with the shovels and rakes and bales of pine straw and plastic pots, calling out to Nancy where to turn. It was an old graveyard, mostly Gaineys and Mel’s family, the Stringers. Years ago there had been a fence around it, and a fancy gate with wrought-iron lilies and leaves, but now most of the fence was gone, and two big, old live-oak trees had crumpled the gate. In the front of the graveyard there was a chipped-up urn lying on its side, and a few weather-beaten angels and lumpish lambs, and old Gainey grave markers every which way like snaggleteeth. But in the Stringer plot, a low granite wall framed in a little square of ground, and you couldn’t see the graves for the flowers—mounds of golden lion’s beard, sweeps of pink and white chrysanthemums, nodding silvery heads of summer-farewell, and yellow swamp daisies flopping over the edge. Right down the middle of it, bordered with lamb’s ears, ran a narrow paved path, with chips and shards of blue bottle glass set in the concrete to spell out the words I’M LONESOME WITHOUT YOU, and at the end, between two red rosebushes, an aluminum chair.

It was hard to know what to say about it, and they just stood there staring. The nurse was the first to speak. “Now isn’t this the prettiest thing. Your mama was lucky to have had a boy who loved her enough to do all this.”

He had thought she would understand after all those Saturdays, but in the end Nancy was the one who remembered the blue of the Caribbean cruise, Bob’s ears, the banjo solo, the little quiet place to sit. Nancy grabbed Mel and hugged him around the head so he couldn’t hear all that was said. “He did it for you!” she said to the nurse in a whisper.

“Me!” said the nurse. “What for?”

Mel pulled loose and tried to talk. “You were the one,” he said. “You came that night, when she was breathing like that, you were the one who stopped her suffering.”

The nurse sat down in the chair. Just as he had planned, the little blue-glass-mosaic banjo he had set into the concrete fit exactly between her feet.