Chapter 28: The grave
Luna navigated the car through the rocky road leading to the memorial ground. After her meeting with Gina, Luna needed to talk to someone, she needed to talk with someone she could tell her feelings to, her fears, her worries. She needed to sort through her feelings, like Gina had advised, and she needed to feel that special connection that came with talking to a person she trusted and loved the most in the entire world. And the person she was going to see had all these qualities in him. All of it, and more.
Luna drove up to the iron gates closing the memorial ground from the outside world, the gates slid open as she drove up. She drove through them and up the also rocky paths leading to the cemetery.
Rows and rows of tombstones lined up in an arranged order as Luna drove past, Luna glanced at the names on the tombstones as she always did whenever she came to the memorial ground.
Lisa Hackney III (the third), Jaime Crow Sullivan, Kira Langdon, Larry Samuels II (the second). and as always, Luna wondered what their stories were. The third, the second, names that sounded important and highborn. They probably had generational wealth and influential families who were still alive.
Luna had never bothered to research them, the only reason she even knew of their names was because the grave of someone she loved was in the same place as hers.
She was not the sort of person who judged another human being by their names, or titles. Even though she had every reason to hate rich and influential people, Luna tried not to let her hatred spill into the entire community as a whole.
She had met some really nice and kind rich people ever since her company became successful and she was integrated, albeit partly, into the influential lifestyle. She had met good and kind rich folks, but because of how scarred she had been by one rich family in particular, she had never allowed herself to be friends with the few good and kind people.
She always wondered about the names she saw here, had they been part of the few nice rich people, or had they been part of the larger nightmarish population that broke a young girl’s heart and soul, like Moira Lake?
Luna pulled the car to a stop in the circular parking lot designed at the edge of the beginning of the cemetery. She turned off the ignition and got out of the car. As she started to make her way towards the cemetery, she glanced at the modest house built at the far end of the parking lot. A man waved at her from the porch.
Paul Heath, the cemetery’s overseer and manager. He was a short stocky man in his sixties, he had a broad smile and missing two front teeth. And he was always ready to talk Luna’s ear off whenever she came by, if she let him.
He smiled that broad smile at her now and waved at her. He mouthed something that Luna couldn’t hear clearly because of the distance between them, but she suspected that he was calling her to come over to the house for drinks.
Luna waved back at him even as she continued to walk towards the cemetery.
“Hello, Paul! I’ll come over later, I have to see him first, I don’t have a lot of time!” she shouted back. When Paul still continued to wave and stare at her, she added, “I have to get back to the office soon, but I’ll pop in real quick to see you before I leave.”
Paul finally nodded to indicate that he’d heard her, he still continued to wave and stand on the porch, Luna waved one last time and finally turned completely to continue towards the cemetery.
Although Paul was the primary caregiver of the cemetery, he had other employees under him who took care of the graves and the surroundings. He called them Keepers. But as delegating as he was, he still took his job very seriously. And for that alone, Luna would always be grateful to him.
Finally, she came upon the grave she’d come to the memorial ground for. She stood in front of it for a few seconds, staring at the name engraved on it. Brandon Jones. Her father.
Luna experienced the wave of grief that always washed through her whenever she came to visit her father, sweeping through her body now. She had expected it, so it didn’t bring her to her knees as it had done the first time she visited him. She stood as it washed through her, and when it slid down and out of her body through her fingers, she smiled.
“Hey, Dad,” she cocked her head to the side, “I missed you.”
Those were the exact words she always used to greet him whenever she came to see him. Because they were true. She missed her dad almost every day, at least once a day, thoughts of him fitter across her mind. Sometimes, they don’t linger and they even bring a smile to her face, but other times, they linger and they remain, and they bring that wave of sadness to come crashing over her again.
But when she came to visit him, after the initial wave of grief that she couldn’t help, she made sure to not dwell on the sad. So she smiled more now as she lowered to her knees.
She never brought flowers to the grave, mostly because the cemetery keepers always took care of that for all the graves. They clean, weed out bushes around the graves and always put out flowers to beautify the dead’s resting place.
And Luna also didn’t always bring flowers because her father was allergic to them. She smiled as she remembered how that fact had never stopped her father from buying her mother, who loved flowers, ten bouquets of roses each time for her birthday every year. And how he had always sneezed like crazy carrying them.
“You romantic fool,” Luna whispered now, stroking the edge of the grave. Her smile withered away as she remembered why she had come in the first place. “Dad, I’m sad.”