Nine months is an ugly length of time. It is long enough for the casseroles in your freezer to get freezer-burned around the edges and for the neighbors to stop calling at five o’chock just to check if you are eating. By the time Carol knocked on my door on a Tuesday morning with two cardboard cups of coffee from the gas station, I had forgotten what regular air felt like inside my lungs.
My name is Evelyn Mercer. Frank had been gone since October, tucked away under six feet of damp Kansas clay in the churchyard off Route 40, and I had spent every morning since then sitting in his armchair with my slippers tucked into the sides because the leather still smelled faintly of peppermint tobacco. I did not want to go to Lake Waverly. I hadn’t been back there since the ambulance came to the house in the second week of September, back when the leaves were just starting to turn the color of old pennies and Frank could still walk across the gravel parking lot if I held his elbow.
“Your ankles aren’t the only thing swelling,” I told Carol through the screen door. She was wearing her walking shoes, the ugly gray ones with the Velcro straps that she only wore when she was about to drag me into some kind of therapeutic trap.
“My ankles are fine, Evelyn,” Carol said, not missing a beat. She pushed the screen open herself, because we had lived next door to each other for twenty-two years and knocking was mostly a formality we observed for the mailman. “The weather is fifty-five degrees and sunny, which is a crime to waste sitting in this dark house with the curtains pulled shut. Get Frank’s old flannel from the coat rack. The one with the grease spot on the pocket from the lawnmower. We are going down to the water.”
I argued for maybe three minutes. It was easier to give in than to listen to Carol talk about my blood pressure, which she liked to monitor like she was running a grain elevator. So I pulled the heavy wool shirt around my waist, tied the sleeves in a knot over my stomach the way Frank always did when he got too warm on the trail, and let her lead me out to her Buick.
The lake smelled like mud and wet dog and somebody burning dry oak branches three lots over. Lake Waverly was never much to look at compared to the reservoirs up north, just a muddy horseshoe carved out by the county back in the fifties with two wooden fishing docks that had long since given up trying to stay level. Frank and I spent forty-one Sundays down there. We sat on the same splintered picnic table, the one that leaned about two inches to the left if you sat on the wrong end, and ate ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper while we argued about whether the ducks were too fat to fly.
“Look at that one,” Frank would say, pointing his thumb at some mallard paddling in circles near the reeds. “That bird is built like a bowling ball, Ev. He’s never leaving this county.”
We walked slow down the gravel path. Carol talked about her grandson’s braces, which cost more than our first car, and about how the hardware store had stopped carrying the good hinges for screen doors. I kept my eyes on the ground, watching the gray gravel click under my sneakers. I didn’t want to look at the water. I knew what the water looked like without Frank sitting on the tail gate of the station wagon with his thermos of lukewarm chicory coffee. It looked empty. Like a tooth pulled out of the back of your jaw where you could still feel the hole with your tongue every time you swallowed.
Then we came around the bend by the big sycamore tree.
That tree was Frank’s marker. Every time we walked the loop, he would stop under its branches, pretend he needed to tie his work boot, and catch his breath without admitting his lungs were getting heavy. He thought I didn’t notice. I always noticed. I would stop right beside him and look out across the reeds, pretending I wanted to watch the water striders so he wouldn’t feel small.
There was a bench there now.
It wasn’t one of the old green county tables. It was a proper slab of cedar with heavy iron legs bolted straight into three-inch concrete pads that looked like they had been poured recently because the dirt around the edges was still dark and raw.
I stopped walking. Carol took two more steps before she realized I wasn’t beside her.
“Evelyn?” she said, turning around.
I didn’t answer. I walked past the arm of the bench and looked down at the brass plate screwed into the center of the wood. The screws were brand-new, shiny brass heads that caught the noon sun.
Franklin J. Mercer 1948 to 2023
My knees felt like somebody had emptied the bones right out of them. I reached out and grabbed the back slat to keep from sliding down into the dirt. Carol was beside me in a second, her hand hooked under my elbow like an iron hook.
“Who put this here?” I whispered. My throat felt dry, like I’d been swallowing dust.
Carol didn’t say anything. She was staring at the wood right next to Frank’s plate.
I leaned in closer. My glasses were fogged up from the walk, and I had to take the corner of my sweater to wipe them clean before I could read the second plate. It was smaller than Frank’s, sitting right beside it in the middle of the same cedar slat.
Evelyn R. Mercer
No year. No ending. Just my name, stamped into the metal in the exact same clean block letters.
Underneath it, in smaller writing that looked like it had been punched by hand with a steel punch: Save her a seat.
I covered my mouth with my hand. I didn’t cry the way they do in the movies, with the chin trembling and the nice, clean tears rolling down the cheeks. It came out of me like an ugly bark, one short, wet sound that I couldn’t hold back even if I’d wanted to.
Carol started crying then too, which made me mad for about half a second because I didn’t have room for two people’s grief on that path.
“He didn’t talk to the county board,” I said, my voice shaking so hard the words blurred together. “Frank couldn’t even walk to the mailbox by August. How did this get here?”
“We need to go down to the office,” Carol said, her voice small and thin. “Come on, Ev. Let’s go talk to whoever’s in that little brick building by the boat ramp.”
The park office was a low-slung red brick box with mildew growing along the north corner and old plastic maps of the lake taped to the inside of the glass. The door had a little brass bell that gave a weak *ting* when we pushed it open.
A woman with silver hoop earrings and a cardigan buttoned up the wrong way so the hem crooked to the left was sitting behind a gray metal desk, eating a carton of yogurt with a plastic spoon. She looked up at us over the top of her reading glasses, her eyes sizing up our dusty shoes and my red face.
“Can I help you ladies? If you’re here about the boat permits, the machine by the ramp is down until Thursday.”
“I’m Evelyn Mercer,” I said. I set both hands flat on the scarred laminate counter. “There’s a bench under the sycamore tree by the north bend. My husband’s name is on it. And mine is too.”
The woman stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth. She didn’t look annoyed anymore; she looked like someone who was waiting for the other shoe to drop in a story she’d already read the ending to. She turned her computer screen around so it faced us, her fingers tapping against the plastic keyboard with a dry, clicking sound.
“Franklin Mercer,” she murmured, half to herself. “Right. The memorial application came through back in the winter.”
“He was in hospice in March,” I said, my voice rising an octave higher than I wanted it to. “Frank couldn’t even sit up to drink a glass of orange juice without me holding the straw. He didn’t come down here. He hadn’t left the front bedroom since the snow was on the ground.”
The woman, her name badge said Tasha, written in crooked black marker on blue tape, stopped typing and looked right at me. Not with pity. Just with that flat, heavy look people get when they know a secret they didn’t ask to carry.
“He didn’t have to come down here, Mrs. Mercer,” Tasha said softly. “He called on the phone. March sixth. I remember because my niece’s birthday was that day and he talked my ear off about what kind of wood would hold up best against the winter ice.”
March sixth. That was the week Frank stopped knowing what day it was half the time. That was the week he looked at me over the hospital bed rail and asked me where we put the winter wheat seed, even though we hadn’t farmed in twenty years and lived in a brick ranch with a postage-stamp lawn.
“He paid for two plates,” Tasha said. She reached into a metal file drawer behind her and pulled out a thick manila envelope, the kind with the metal clasp and the red string wound around two cardboard buttons. She slid it across the desk until it hit my knuckles. “He said to keep this in the safe until the first time you came down the path alone and found it.”
My thumb rested on the flap of the envelope. It felt heavy, like it had something solid inside it, maybe an old key or a stack of coins. The wall clock in the corner of the office kept ticking, a loud, heavy *clack-clack* that sounded like someone dropping marbles on a hardwood floor.
“Was I wrong to open it right there?” I asked the empty room, though Carol was standing right beside me breathing through her nose.
I didn’t wait for her to answer. I hooked my nail under the metal clasp, unwound the red string, and pulled out the folded piece of lined yellow paper.
*Ev,* it said in those big, stubborn block letters he used for building chicken coops and marking canning jars. *If you’re reading this, Carol finally got you out of the house. Don’t yell at her; she’s right. I couldn’t finish the back deck before my legs went out, but I made damn sure I got our spot locked down before the county gave it to someone else. Sit there on Sundays. Feed the fat ducks for me. And don’t you dare sell my red toolbox until you’ve cleared out the bottom tray.*
I looked down at the paper until the blue lines started to run together into one long smear. Outside the window, a mallard with a green head waddled up onto the muddy bank, looking around like he owned the place.
