Payment receipts from the cemetery office. Eleven of them, one for every month he had been working. And beside them, wrapped in a grocery bag, a granite headstone marker with his father’s name cut into it. When his dad died, we could only afford the plot. The marker was a flat metal plate with a card slipped inside, and it had faded so badly by last spring that you could not read the name. Desmond noticed before I did. He had been paying it off in installments, ninety dollars at a time, and that afternoon he had tried to carry the finished stone out to the car by himself. It weighs eighty-four pounds. That was the crash Teodoro heard.
The mud and the torn sleeve were from the month before. He had walked the stone’s base out to the plot on foot, alone, after a rainstorm, and slipped on the slope near the creek path. He never told me because he wanted the whole thing finished before I ever knew. Teodoro had figured it out weeks earlier from the receipts and had been quietly adding hours to Desmond’s pay to help it along. He called me that day only because the boy had nearly hurt himself trying to lift it.
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