He chose a bench and sat, needing the peace here, and, yes, maybe something of the essence of his forebears, to process all he’d experienced since coming to this town. He’d learned so much, and not just about his family but about himself. He realized, as he let his gaze wander, that he was between the grave of Kate’s husbands and their parents and Charles, Samuel, and Madeline Kennedy Benedict.
The sound of a light, brisk step snagged his attention, and he looked toward that sound. Grandma Kate, carrying a basket and wearing a straw hat, was walking toward him. Jason got to his feet. He’d thought he’d wanted to be alone, but now he knew that wasn’t so at all. He found it easy to smile at the nonagenarian, because he really was very happy to see her.
“It’s a good day for grave sitting,” Kate said. “May I join you?”
“Please do.” He waited until she sat then took his place beside her. “Grave sitting. I’m not sure if that was what I was doing, or not. I’d just been to the museum, and this…” He looked around, taking in his surroundings. “This seemed to be the logical next step.”
“It’s a lot to take in, the history of this family. It’s so for those who were born and raised here. So I know it’s especially a lot for those who have recently discovered Lusty.”
Jason felt his face heat. “Not so recently for me, really, Grandma Kate.”
“Two years wasn’t all that long ago, dear boy.” Kate looked around at what, to her, must be a very familiar place.
He nodded toward the grave of his great-grandparents. “Did none of their children ever come home?”
“For visits, a couple of times, yes. But not to live here. Emerson settled in Montana after the war. A good number of his grandsons are here, now. But Howard and Lincoln? They came, each of them, once to visit and then again for their mother’s funeral.”
“I wonder if that’s why she died so young. Because her sons more or less deserted her.”
“We all treated them as grandparents of our own children, those of us who lived here, Benedicts, Kendalls, and Jessops alike. We were family, and that was what mattered most. But between you and me?” Kate sighed. “Rosie’s youngest had died, and that was a heart wound to her. I never fully understood that, until I lost a child.” Kate nodded toward one of the gardens he’d noticed earlier, in the near corner and tucked against the small picket fence that surrounded the yard.
“Those are antique roses. They were a particular favorite of my daughter, Maria. She and her own daughter, Amy, perished in a plane crash in 1990. The accident happened over the Atlantic Ocean, and they were never found. My husbands and I chose that garden as a way of memorializing them both here.”
Jason saw pruning shears and gloves in the basket and reasoned Kate had come today to tend that garden.
They sat quietly for a few moments. Jason didn’t mind the silence. It felt good, here. Not just a place for holding bones, but maybe secrets, too. The kind of secrets that give meaning to a life.
“I recall a similar day, forty-four years ago,” Kate said. “I encountered a young woman here, a woman I’d never met. She was sitting on a blanket, right over there.” Kate pointed ahead and to the right. “That young woman looked as if—well, she looked as if she was all alone in the world and completely overwhelmed. Which, as it turned out, she had been and was. You see, she had believed herself truly orphaned and alone in the world, with the recent deaths of her grandmother and then her mother. But in the aftermath of those two stinging traumas, she discovered that her grandmother, Maude Parker, had been born and raised in Lusty.”
“So that made her family to you.”
Kate’s smile beamed. “Yes, and she still is and even more so, because the young Miss Parker married my younger sons, Carson and Michael.”
“You’re talking about Aunt Abigail!”
“I am, indeed. She never learned who her father or even her grandfather were. But she came here and found family, and her destiny.”
“It matters.” He looked at the stone memorials and the garden. He took in the park-like setting and understood it was a park, one to be visited and enjoyed. “It matters, because there were relationships. Not just lives lived from birth to death in the pursuit of goals. Not just facts and figures, successes and failures. But lives lived, touching other lives.”
“It matters, yes. And that’s the point of it all, don’t you think?”
“I’m beginning to. I’m remembering a warning about gaining the world and losing one’s soul.”
“Precisely. In the end, of all the things we acquire and things we accomplish, it’s the love, the family, and the friendships, the relationships made and the memories that remain. The building you work in won’t ache for you when you’re gone the way your loved ones will.”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know why I let myself get so…so damn rigid in my thinking, as if people, hell as if emotions didn’t matter.”
Kate opened her mouth and then closed it again. Jason perceived she wanted to say something but hesitated to share what was on her mind. Right then and there, he knew he very much wanted to know what Grandma Kate had to say.
“Please don’t censure your words. I thought I came to this spot to be alone. Now I think I’m here because I need to hear whatever it is you have to say.”
Kate met his gaze and nodded. “All right, then, I will. Do you remember your early school experiences? Kindergarten through fourth or fifth grade?”
That’s a strange segue and an even stranger question. Jason tilted his head to the side.
