I visited my daughter’s grave every Sunday, blaming myself for the night I didn’t pick her up. Then the groundskeeper told me another woman had been visiting with daisies and apologies. I thought I already knew how my daughter died, but I was wrong about who’d buried the truth.
I cried at my daughter’s grave every Sunday for a month before Otis, the cemetery groundskeeper, finally stopped pretending he didn’t see me.
That fourth Sunday, I brought white roses again because the florist had called them “proper.” Maya would have made a face at that.
My seventeen-year-old daughter liked yellow daisies, chipped nail polish, and jeans with paint on the knees.
But Maya was gone before I could bring her daisies on some ordinary birthday.
Gone before graduation or the art scholarship letter. And gone before I could take back the last thing I said to her.
That night, she’d asked me to pick her up because she was tired and scared of driving in the rain.
I’d been tired of standing between her and Jordan.
“Ask your father,” I’d said. “I’m done being the referee tonight.
You two need to sort yourselves out.”
Two hours later, the police knocked on our door.
Two cars had gone off near the bridge. No survivors.
The funeral director said the casket had to stay closed. The officers told me it was kinder that way.
So, every Sunday, I knelt at Maya’s grave and whispered the same thing.
“I’m sorry, baby.
I should have picked you up.”
Jordan came with me twice. After that, he stopped.
“It isn’t healthy, Jackie,” he said that morning while I stood by the door with the roses. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“Then act like it.
Stop falling apart every Sunday.”
That was my habit with Jordan. I softened. When he called Maya’s art a hobby, I said, “Your dad just worries.” When he mocked her scholarship, I said, “He’s just scared for your future, sweetheart.”
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