We went together. He stood at both graves that afternoon, longer at Bennett's than I expected, and I didn't ask him what he said, if anything, standing there. Some conversations, I've learned, only need one listener, and it doesn't always have to be a living one.
I still have the soda can tab Bennett slipped onto my finger in that hospital room, kept now in a small box beside the folded yellow sweater I wore that day. I married a stranger so he wouldn't have to die alone, and I never once expected that decision to end with me standing in a cemetery in Ashport, watching a broken family find one final, quiet piece of repair, twenty years too late for the people it might have helped the most.
