Page 29 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

The carving of a tiny star remains visible near the base.

I brush my fingers lightly across the cool lichen.

"Sarah Jane Holloway."

Lavinia looks over.

"How do you know that?"

"She loved animals," I continue quietly. "Especially stray dogs. She once smuggled an injured fox into her father's barn because she was certain no one else would care for it."

Lavinia studies me with open curiosity.

"That's . . . oddly specific."

For a moment I consider telling her the truth.

That I remember the fox.

That I remember Sarah Jane laughing because it bit her father instead.

Instead I offer the gentlest explanation I possess.

"It's a small town."

I glance toward the rows of weathered stones stretching across the hillside.

"Some stories survive longer than the names carved above them."

She laughs, soft and pleased. "Yeah, that's true. You always seem to know more than you let on."

I wonder if she means it as an accusation. But she does not know how small this world is, not truly, and how the only way to keep it bearable is to remember something for everyone, even the ones who are long since decomposed to atoms.

Lavinia shakes off her gloves and places the new bouquet at the base of the marker. "You know, I started doing this when I was little," she says. "My mother wouldn't let me keep pets. Too much responsibility, she said. So I adopted graves. Each one, I'd give a little flower, talk to them, tell them about my day. Eventually I got a part-time job at the cemetery, and now . . ." she spreads her arms, encompassing the rows and rows of the forgotten, "I have all the orphans I could ever wish for."

I look at her, the only living person in a field of the dead, and something inside me stirs—a longing, dense as a planet, to tell her what I am, what I know, what I have seen. To tell her that what she does here heals more than memories.

"I like what you do," I say, in my way.

She collects a stray lock of hair behind her ear, glances sideways. "You know, most people think it's a little morbid, hanging around here."

I smile, or I try. "Most people don't know what it means to be seen even after you're gone."

She stands, brushing off her knees. "You coming?" she asks, heading for the next row.

I follow. I always have.

She stops at another grave—tiny, granite, set with a chipped angel—and kneels again. The inscription is nearly gone. "Her name was Millie," Lavinia tells me, like she's letting me in on a secret. "Never made it past six. There's no family left, but she deserves a flower too." This time, rather than a bouquet, she places a single violet. It looks like a droplet of spring, defiant against the gray sky.

"She wanted to be a veterinarian," I say, and this time it makes Lavinia go still.

She turns, studying me. "That's not in any of the records."

"It wouldn't be," I answer. "Sometimes the records are . . . incomplete."

She smiles, but it's a different sort of smile. Cautious, as if sensing the boundaries of a conversation she did not know she had entered.

She stops at another marker. Its marble is the color of spoiled cream, the letters ghosting away under moss and lichen. "Poor Mr. Holloway," Lavinia says, voice full of the peculiar ache she reserves for things past saving. "No one's visited in years."