We got a sealed urn.
My son-in-law, Mark Stevens, stood between my wife Eleanor and me at that funeral and held us both up. He cried into my shoulder at the reception and I held the back of his head like he was my own son.
Six months later Eleanor died in our kitchen at 5:50 in the morning. The certificate says cardiac arrest.
I’ve always called it something else.
And after that, my whole world fit into two things: a grocery store and a little girl.
Every January I Wired Mark Stevens Forty Thousand Dollars, and I Never Once Asked What It Was For
Every January. Seven years.
School. Clothes. Food. Dentist. Whatever my granddaughter needed, because my daughter had asked me for one thing in her life that she ever really asked me for.
She said it in my kitchen about four months before the accident, and she said it like a joke and she wasn’t joking:
