That’s how it was then. The nurses were kind but no one really explained what to do with grief like that. You went home. You didn’t speak of it. People said it was nature’s way, which is the cruelest sentence in the English language, and you were supposed to agree and move on.

So we did. Or I thought we did. Harold and I never talked about her, not once in all the years after. I don’t know who decided that. I think we just both went quiet at the same time and the quiet became permanent.

We never named her. That’s the part that has always sat wrong with me. We were so young and so wrecked and nobody suggested it and so we just didn’t. She was buried as Baby Girl Meacham in a plot Harold handled because I couldn’t. He told me at some point, a year or two later I think, that he’d sold the plot back. That it was taken care of. I assumed that meant what I assumed it meant.

I found out on a Wednesday, I think. Actually no, it was a Tuesday. I drove out to Cedar Hill with the receipts on the passenger seat and the window down because it was a nice enough day and I needed the air. The cemetery is about twenty minutes from the farm. I’d driven past the entrance a hundred times over the years without ever turning in.

The groundskeeper was a younger man, probably mid-forties, and he was very matter-of-fact and kind about it, which was the right combination. He looked up the lot number, walked me to Section 4 himself. He pointed at a small granite stone under an oak tree that was enormous, the kind of tree that takes a hundred years to get that big.

The stone was clean. No moss, no weathering of the inscription. Someone had been taking care of it. Of course someone had.

I stood there for, I don’t know, a minute or two before I could actually read what it said. My eyes were not cooperating.

The name carved on the stone was Margaret. And underneath the name it said: “Loved. Known. Not forgotten.”

I had to sit down. I sat right down on the grass and I didn’t care about my pants or about the groundskeeper standing a respectful distance away. I just sat.