“You can’t know that.”
“I have a canny memory, you said so.”
“You were four.”
“I was drinking chocolate milk. Momma put it in my sippy cup so I could take it with me. We watchedMagnum, P.I.on your couch, then you put me to bed right after. Idid nothave to take a bath that night.”
“Huh.”
“The radio is broken.” I had twisted the dial from one end to the other and got nothing but static.
“It’s not broken, it’s just hard to get a signal here.”
“Then why did you bring it?”
“Because sometimes we do get a signal, and your mother liked music.”
Bob FM was at 96.9. I turned the dial a little left of the mark for ninety-seven. Huey Lewis said something about a new drug, then faded back to static.
I dropped the radio back on the blanket near Auntie Jo’s bag. “Maybe I’ll skip the bath.”
“You’re not skipping your bath.”
“If I skip my bath tonight, then we can stay until seven and I still won’t missKnight Rider,” I explained.
Auntie Jo snuffed out her cigarette on the side of Daddy’s stone, then placed it in a small tin she kept in the apron pocket of her faded pink waitress uniform. Normally she would toss the butt off into the grass somewhere, but not here, not at the cemetery, certainly not near Momma’s grave. She found another, lit it up, and sucked in another puff. “Okay, no bath tonight, but you’re getting one for sure tomorrow. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“One more hour, then,” she said. “What does this here say, Jack? Can you read it?”
“You know I can.”
“Then what does it say?”
“You make me read it every year.”
““What does it say, Jack?” She knocked at the side of Momma’s gravestone with the hand holding the lighter. “Read.”
I rolled my eyes. “Kaitlyn Gargery Thatch. February 16, 1958 to August 8, 1980. Loving wife, mother, and sister.”
“My sweet baby sister. It should also say, ‘killed by an evil man who drank himself into the grave next door and dragged her along kicking and screaming so he wouldn’t have to be alone.”
“Daddy didn’t drink.”
“He drank plenty.”
Auntie Jo liked to drink, wine mostly. Auntie Jo assumed everyone drank. If Daddy drank, I never saw him. Momma did, not much, though, not like Auntie Jo.
Daddy’s stone only had his name, birthdate, and the date of his death. Same day as Momma. If my Auntie Jo had her way, he might not have a stone at all. Luckily, it had not been up to Auntie Jo—the guys at the hardware store where Daddy worked all pitched in and paid for both, on account of Momma and Daddy not having put money aside for burials. Both stones were carved from the same slab of black granite. Momma’s shone, having been polished meticulously by Auntie Jo when we arrived. Daddy’s carried a layer of dust and dirt, the surface dull beneath. I’d come back later to clean it, make it shine like Momma’s.
I was four when they died, and the rounded tops of both gravestones had towered over me. Now, though, I was more than a foot taller. I stood up now and smoothed my jeans over knobby knees.
“Where are you going?”
“I wanna go for a walk.”
Auntie Jo frowned. “You should stay and talk to your mother. I’m sure she would like to hear everything that happened in the past year.”
