Chapter 7: White Carnations

On April eighteenth I got up at four and drove to Calvary Cemetery in the dark.

I had been to my mother's grave twice in fourteen years.

The first time I was nineteen and angry.

The second time I'd flown in for forty-eight hours between my residency and my fellowship and left again before it got light.

I carried a bunch of yellow tulips from a gas station.

She had liked yellow tulips, and she'd been a woman who bought them from gas stations herself.

The cemetery lay on a hill above the river, wet with fog, with long rows of gray stones.

Hers was small, in the St. Joseph section, near a yew tree.

MAUREEN ROONEY.

Beloved mother.

The dates stood under the name, and the second one was the nineteenth.

I knelt and put the tulips down.

"Hi, Mom," I said.

The fog took the words.

"I'm in the house now. I'm Rafe Corliss's wife. You'd think that's funny."

I touched the silver ring on the cord under my collar, the only thing of hers I wear.

It was a Claddagh, two hands holding a heart.

I put my hand on the cold stone.

"I found the ledger. They never filed a report. I'll find the rest."

Gravel crunched behind me.

I stood up fast and stepped behind the yew.

A tall man in a long coat was coming up the path with something white in his arms.

He moved slowly, with a stoop.

When he reached the stone, he stopped and stood there for a long moment.

Then he took a hand out of his coat pocket.

It was his right hand, the one he always hid.

It shook so hard that the flowers in it rustled.

He was holding a bunch of white carnations.

Dr. Leland Osgood knelt on the wet grass and laid them on my mother's grave, beside the tulips.

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