My son had been gone three weeks before his eighth birthday, and every Sunday, I came here to tell him about the neighborhood he no longer got to see.
I knelt at his headstone and set the flowers down.
“Mrs. Callahan finally painted her shutters, baby. That awful mustard color you used to laugh at. She picked blue this time.”
The wind moved through the trees, and I pretended it was an answer.
I had been doing this for two years, and for one of those years, I had not done it alone.
He was already there when I looked up.
The same scruffy golden retriever mix, no collar, lying on his belly beside Ethan’s grave with his chin resting on his paws. He watched me with calm brown eyes, the way a person keeps quiet company at a wake.
Continue on the next page:
