He Defended My Mother's Killer, Now He Pays with His Life novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Carnations

I went to my mother's grave alone, early, before the cemetery gates had finished opening.

The headstone was gray granite, polished, with her name cut deep.

Brice had paid for it.

I stood in front of it with my hands in my pockets and decided that I would pay to have it replaced.

Then I saw the flowers.

White carnations, a dozen of them, fresh, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

They lay across the base of the stone.

Under them there were older ones, dried to paper, pressed flat into the grass.

There were more beneath those.

A groundskeeper was clipping the hedge two rows over.

"Excuse me," I said. "Who leaves these?"

He took off his cap.

"A big fellow with a square jaw," he said. "Comes on the fourteenth of every month. Three years now, rain or shine. Doesn't say a word, just stands there a while with his hands behind his back."

"Does he wear a jacket? Leather?"

"With a gun on his belt, ma'am. I looked the other way about that."

I put my hand over my mouth.

He had never told me.

Every month for three years, he had come here with flowers for a woman he had promised in her own kitchen.

I knelt in the damp grass and straightened the twine.

"Thank you, Mom," I said to the stone. "I think you'd like him."

I drove home and baked a cake.

I had not planned to.

I stood in my mother's kitchen with the yellow-flowered tiles and the old oven that ran hot, and I took out butter and lemons and a bag of sugar.

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