His mother and the child she’d tried to bring into the world were both long dead.

May had greened the grass and the trees, and the breeze stirred the green. The ground rolled, gentle slopes and dips where somber gray markers or faithful white monuments rose, and the sun cast their shadows. His mother and his sister who’d died inside her had a white marker. Though it had been years, many years, since he’d walked this way, he knew where to find them.

The single stone was very simple, small, rounded, with only names and dates carved.

CATHERINE MARY TURNER

1954 – 1982

ROSE ELIZABETH TURNER

1982

He barely remembered her, he thought. Time simply rubbed the images, the sounds, the feel of her to a faded blur. He had only the vaguest memory of her laying his hand against her swollen belly so he could feel the baby kick. He had a picture, so he knew he favored his mother in coloring, in the shape of his eyes, his mouth. He’d never seen the baby, and no one had ever told him what she looked like. But he remembered being happy, remembered playing with trucks in the sunsplash through a window. And yes, even of running to the door when his father came home from work, and screaming with fun as those hands lifted him up high.

There’d been a time, a brief time, when his father’s hands had lifted him instead of knocking him down. The sun-splashed time, he supposed. Then she’d died, and the baby with her, and everything had gone dark and cold.

Had she ever shouted at him, punished him, been impatient? Surely, she must have. But he couldn’t remember any of that, or chose not to. Maybe he’d idealized her, but what was the harm? When a boy had a mother for such a brief time, the man was entitled to think of her as perfect.

“I didn’t bring flowers,” he murmured. “I should have.”

“But you came.”