This is a cemetery which has its shapely tended trees and flowerful shrubs and Halloween headstones that go back two hundred years. The thing that is different about the annex is that the annex is not landscaped. It is a wild grown-over field of scrub oak and dune grass that gets bulldozed and plowed under as the need, in somebody’s mind, arises, one row at a time. Except that the men who run the bulldozers and things don’t call what they are clearing a row.

I made a point of finding out.

They call it a plot line.

From every window in the front of our house, when you look out, that gravestone is what you see—from the sun-porch, from the living room, from the dining room, from the bedroom upstairs, from the garage where my husband and I have been cleaning out the junk that belonged to the previous owners, which is why I cannot now find the shovel when I reach up to the place where it should be.

There is every other kind of tool hanging from nails pounded in. My husband is good at all the housey things that require these bucksaws and shingling hammers and extension ladders, the pitchfork and pruning shears, the lazy boy, the pick.

You see what it is? It is a two-car garage with a loft where we haven’t had time yet to make the big effort to clean out the crap from the previous owners, why didn’t they clean out their own crap, is what I want to know. The oversized stuffed animals, the rotten throw pillows, the mildewed best-sellers from other summers, everything cheap and ruined and left behind.

Where is the shovel?

Can you believe it? The flowers were baby’s breath.

I wanted to ask my husband if you call it a baby at the age of five months.

I mean five unborn months!

According to him, my husband, the date on the stone is only the month and the year. But I have not crossed the street to see if that is really what the stone says.

I can tell you it’s got an arch across the top. But no cherubs that I can see.

And I can see.

For days after the burial, I would go inside the house, leaving weeds unpulled in the border of portulaca; I would leave the hose coupling loose and spitting, and hide out in the kitchen while the woman visited the site. I would pour myself a glass of lemonade and carry it into the dining room and look across the street to where the woman had parked her rental car and was standing there looking at her dead baby.

She came with some new flowers today. I saw her come with them. They are a big bunch of purple cosmos. Local—what’s in bloom right now.

The other thing she did was plant a row of impatiens that I happen to know will not last any time at all in this heat.