But she didn’t seem happy about it. “That wasn’t me, honey,” she said. “It was just her time. That wasn’t me, that was Sister Morphine that stopped her suffering.” She stood up and brushed herself off as if there might have been trash in the chair. “I’m no angel, I’m just a hospice nurse!”

When they got back to the Citgo, a man was mad because the nurse had left her car blocking the vacuum, and while she tried to explain—“I didn’t know we’d be gone that long”—Nancy sat Mel down on the picnic bench with his back to the nurse and squatted down in front of him with her hands on his knees.

“She’s used to doing for other people,” Nancy said. “She’s not used to having other people do for her. She’s not ungrateful, she just wasn’t ready for such a thing. It took her by surprise.”

But Mel couldn’t listen to all that, and on the way home he started crying. He cried and cried just like a baby. He couldn’t stop. At first his grandmother thought it was the rabbits and went on and on about never-ending cycles, but when he still didn’t stop after supper and way on past bedtime, she decided it must be one of those stages of grief she had read about. “Well, finally!” she said.

And she was right in a way. Life did just march on and on. The first freeze came in about a week, and that was the end of the garden. Over the winter the concrete path cracked into pieces—Mel hadn’t known how thick to make it. The polished side of his mother’s marker with her name and the dates lost some of its shine, and lichen sprouted on the rough backside, so it started to blend in with all the other Stringers and Gaineys. Centipede grass is an aggressive spreader, and it sent out runners across the walkway until by August you could only see a few little chips of the blue here and there, shining through the grass, that used to say I’M LONESOME WITHOUT YOU.

The Garden

A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Rose plot,

Fringed pool,

Ferned grot—

The veriest school

Of peace; and yet the fool

Contends that God is not—

Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool?

Nay, but I have a sign:

’Tis very sure God walks in mine.

CLINK, CLUNK, CLINK. Day after day that summer they could hear the little taps of the chisel as Nana carved those words into a slab of marble out in the new garden she was making on the side of the house. By August the carving was done, little, wobbly letters with mismatched serifs crawling across the pink marble slab.