"You sure about this, Vel?"
Velma looked down at the shovel in her hands. Metal was cold against her palms and blisters were already forming. Before her, the old cemetery stretched away like a set of crooked teeth in the moonlight.
"Course I'm sure," she said, but her voice shook. "Been planning this for three months."
Her cousin Deshawn shook his head. "This is crazy. What if-
"What if nothing. Dig me or go home."
She'd been appearing here every Sunday since the funeral. Seated on the bench outside the gate, staring at the headstone that read "Beloved Mother" in flowing letters. The problem was, under all that marble and roses, there wasn't really a body.
See, her mama got cremated. Family preference, they told us. It's cheaper, they told us. But Mama had always insisted that she wanted to be buried next to her own mama, right here in Oakwood Cemetery. Had the grave all picked out and everything.
"I don't get it," Deshawn whispered, looking around wide-eyed. "Why can't we just. I don't know, bury the urn in the daytime like everybody else?"
Velma laughed, but it was no laughing sound. "You think they'd let me? I talked to the people in the cemetery. They said the paper had already been placed in, the headstone was already placed. Case closed."
She started digging. The first few scoops were easy - just grass and soft dirt. But after that, it got harder. Rocky. Her back ached something terrible.
"This is crazy, Vel. What if somebody catches us?"
"Then we run."
Reality was, she'd been carrying her mama's ashes in a coffee can for six months already. Had them on the kitchen counter beside the sugar bowl. Daily she'd look at that can and think about how everything was all wrong. How Mama was to be here, in the ground, where she was supposed to be.
The hole was deeper. At least three feet deep now. Deshawn had finally started to help, complaining under his breath that they were going to end up in jail.
"Remember what Mama always used to say to us about this place?" Velma said, pausing to wipe her face on her arm.
"Yeah. She'd bring us here when we were little children and explain all that to us about Great-Grandmama."
"Right there." Velma pointed to a headstone twenty feet away. "That's where she is. Mama wanted to be close to her."
They dug some more. Metal hitting ground sounded like thunder in the quiet night. Both of them would pause every few minutes, thinking that they heard footsteps or a car door shut. But it was just wind through the trees.
"Deep enough?" Deshawn questioned as they had come up to about four feet.
Velma nodded. She removed the coffee tin from her backpack. It was heavier than it had been, and she stood there for a moment just holding it against her chest.
"Want to say something?" Deshawn asked.
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Something. nice?"
Velma looked down at the can. Masking tape ran along the side with "MAMA" scribbled in her own handwriting. She'd put it there the day she'd brought the ashes from the funeral parlor.
"She would have liked this," she said finally. "Being here. She always said she wanted to keep an eye on Great-Grandmama's grave."
She knelt and placed the tin in the hole. It appeared small down there, resting in all that dark earth.
"Mama, I'm sorry it took so long. I'm sorry they wouldn't obey you when you told them what you wanted. But you're home now."
They filled up the grave. It took forever - a whole lot longer than it took to dig the hole. Both of them were sweating and out of breath by the time they'd finished.
"What about the headstone?" Deshawn asked.
Velma looked over at the white marble thingy with her mama's name on it. "Let 'em have it. She's home now, where she belongs. That's all that matters."
They filled their shovels and started towards the cemetery entrance. The sun was coming up, painting the sky with oranges and pinks.
"Do you think she knows?" Deshawn asked.
"Knows what?"
"That we did this. That she's where she wanted to be."
Velma thought about it. "Yeah. I think she does."
As they approached the gate, she turned back once again. Here you couldn't even see that the ground had been disturbed. It seemed like any other grave in the cemetery - serene, settled, right.
"Come on," she said to Deshawn.
"Let's go home."
But she'd be back next Sunday. Not to sit on that bench outside the gate pining away, but to visit her mama's real grave. The one that mattered. The one where she actually was.
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