Chapter 6: Bonaventure

Patrick's POV

I walked my mother back across the yard in the dark with my shirt unbuttoned and my wife's heartbeat still in my chest.

"She isn't Ivy, you know," my mother said at the kitchen door.

"I know who she is."

"She was hired, Patrick. I only want you to remember it."

I did not answer, because I did not trust what I would say.

I had known since the hospital corridor that my mother had bought me a wife.

I had stood beside my dying father's bed and agreed to it because I couldn't bear his face.

I had said it too easily, with the nurse in earshot, and I hadn't seen her turn.

I called her Mrs. Habersham in my head because I could not call her anything else.

She was a stranger in my dead wife's dresses, with black hair to her waist and a laugh that filled a room.

She had walked into my workshop in a nightgown and told me exactly what she wanted.

I had wanted her since the corridor, and I hated myself for it.

At five I gave up the study sofa and went out to the truck.

She was sitting in the passenger seat.

She had Ivy's black wool coat over her nightgown and her own sneakers on her feet.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Bonaventure."

"I know. I'm coming."

I gripped the wheel. "I was going to go alone."

"I know that too," she said. "Drive."

I drove.

Bonaventure sits on a bluff over the Wilmington River, under oaks so old and so hung with moss that the light comes down green.

At that hour the gates are chained.

I have a key, because my family owns four plots and a mausoleum.

The fog lay on the grass in sheets.

Ivy's stone stood at the end of the third row under a live oak.

It was plain grey granite, with her name and two dates cut into it.

IVY ROSE HABERSHAM. BELOVED.

My mother had picked the word.

I had asked for the stone to say nothing at all.

"There's a box under that," I said. "It's empty. They dug the hole in July and lowered an empty box, and four hundred people sang a hymn."

Edie stood beside me with her hands pushed into the coat sleeves.

"You didn't want a funeral."

"I wanted a body. I wanted to know."

"And you got a stone," she said.

"I got my mother's choice of adjective."

She laughed, very short, and then she put her arm through mine.

We stood there in the wet, and it wasn't a thing I could have explained, but I was not alone.

"I talk to her sometimes," I said. "It's stupid."

"It isn't stupid."

"I tell her the house is falling apart without her. I tell her I'm sorry."

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