Shadows Have Gone by Lissa Bryan Page B

visitors became fewer, Carly only kept a few lit.
    Sam got up from the corner and came to lay his head on her leg. He let out a long sigh, his amber eyes gleaming in the candle light.
    “I’m okay,” she said. She stroked her thumb along one of his ears. “I’m okay.”
    He snorted softly through his nose, and she could imagine him thinking, No you’re not. I know when you’re lying .
    “I’ll be okay.” Carly gave a little sigh. Maybe that was a lie, too.
    Dagny slept against Justin’s chest, her hand gripping the neck of his T-shirt. Part of Carly insisted a wake was no place for a baby, but it seemed harsher to separate Dagny from her family. The poor baby had experienced a few unsettling few weeks, first with her mother’s illness, then with them being gone for the battle, and now this. Dagny couldn’t understand what was going on, but she could tell her parents were upset. And they had no way of soothing her when they were unsettled themselves. Let her be with them and take what comfort she could from their presence.
    Pearl and Stan had dug the grave that afternoon, after discovering the proper place from Veronica, who had piped up during their discussion of where Miz Marson should be buried.
    “There’s a bunch of Marsons buried in Pleasant Acres.”
    “What? Where’s that?”
    “It’s outside of town. You know where that gas station is? It’s down that road—”
    “Veronica!” Stacy’s eyes had widened. “I told you about roaming outside of town. You could be—”
    “I’m careful,” Veronica had said.
    “Why were you in the cemetery?”
    Veronica shrugged. “I like it there. There are really old graves, and the stones are really cool. I dunno. I like reading them and imagining what the people were like. I found the Marsons there. Maybe we should bury Old Miz Marson with them. I mean, they gotta be her family, right?”
    Pearl had made the decision of where to place the grave itself. She’d read the stones, and there were two men with the last name of Marson, both aged in their forties, who had died in the 1970s. Without digging into Miz Marson’s things upstairs, which Carly flatly refused to do, they could not be certain which of them was Miz Marson’s husband. Veronica had the idea of looking in an old phone book to see if they could find where each man had lived, and they did discover a shelf of old phone books in the courthouse but none dating back to the seventies. The rest of the courthouse records from that far back had been put on microfilm years ago.
    Pearl finally decided to cut the Gordian Knot and dug the grave horizontally at the feet of both men, so they’d know she was beside her husband, whichever man that had been.
    Carly thought that was the right choice. After all, the days of neat, orderly cemeteries were probably gone, too.
    “We’ll have the funeral graveside,” Justin said. “And Stan is going to make her a stone, but Carly, what do we put on it? No one knows her first name.”
    He was right. She shook her head. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was. She’d always just called her Miz Marson and never really thought about what her first name was. It was strange, but it had never seemed like an important detail.
    “Carly, maybe you could look through Miz Marson’s papers. You know how older people are. They save everything. She saved his clothes . . . she probably saved their records, too.”
    Carly shook her head. “I don’t think so, Justin. I know it’s silly, but I feel like I ought to preserve her privacy. If she wanted us to know, she would have told us. Just bury her with them. And let her keep the name she chose to go by. That would make her happy.”
    He nodded. “All right.”
    “How’s he doing it?” Carly was curious.
    “He’s using one of the flat stones that used to be the steps of the church. We hooked a rotary tool with a grinder bit to the generator, and he can use it to inscribe a name into the stone. It’ll be