They Laughed When I Left, So I Came Home the Town's Doctor novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Plot

Tuomas's POV

I did not go home.

I drove across town in the dark with the heater off, because I wanted to feel the cold.

The county cemetery sits on the far side of Marquette, past the lumber yard, on a slope that gets all the wind off the lake.

My father is not there.

My father is in the Ahola plot at Zion, under a gray stone with room for his wife.

Eero is beside him.

I had stood at that stone every September for seven years and thought I understood what it meant to lose a brother.

I got out of the truck and walked up the slope with my hands in my pockets.

The grass was stiff with frost, and the flurry had stopped.

I knew where she was.

I had never visited, because I had never been told I could.

LEENA ELISE PELTO, the stone said, and under it two dates and the words BELOVED FRIEND.

It was not even her married name.

I stood in front of it for a long time.

"You were his wife," I said, out loud, to a piece of granite. "I'm sorry nobody said so."

The wind did not answer.

I thought of a girl with red-blond braids on my mother's dining room chair, saying bubbles are better in milk.

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