I type grave deeds three days a week. On Tuesday a transfer came across my desk for the plot beside my husband’s. He has been in it eleven years. My son signed the transfer. The buyer is a woman I have never heard of, and the county stamps it Friday at noon.

My son got me this job. He brought it up over dinner one Sunday when the roast was still warm on the plate.

“Two afternoons of typing, Mom,” he had said, reaching for another potato. “Something to do with your hands.”

So I sit at a metal desk in the cemetery office with a fan running on the file cabinet, and I type the names of dead people onto index cards, and half this town believes I am there to make the coffee and water the ferns in the lobby.

The transfer came in the morning mail with a check clipped to the corner by a bent wire paperclip.

The line at the bottom of the form says PURCHASER. There is a woman’s name typed on that line, first and last, and I have never heard it in my life.

The line above it says RELINQUISHED BY. That one has my son’s signature on it, in the fat black pen he uses for his real estate paperwork and his birthday cards.

I did not call him. I put my glasses back in their case. The case clicked.

Bev has worked the front counter since her husband passed away from his heart. She read the form over my shoulder, her fingers smelling faintly of lemon hand cream, and made a small sound in the back of her throat.

“That’s the space next to Vernon,” she said. Her voice dropped an octave, the way people talk in funeral homes even when nobody is crying. “Honey. Isn’t that one yours?”

“It’s my husband’s row,” I said.

“That is not what I asked you.”

“No,” I told her, smoothing the corner of the paper with my thumb. “It isn’t.”

Here is what my family does not know about this job. They think I am rattling keys and punching a keyboard because I rattle around the house too much since Vernon went under the sod.

The old cards in the vault drawer are all handwritten, and the ink has gone brown like dried tea leaves, and nobody in this office under sixty can read the clerk’s hand from back then. I can. That is the real reason I was hired. The director slid a card across the desk during my first week, testing me to see if I was just a charity case with a widow’s pension, and I read it out loud like the morning newspaper, every loop and slant. He did not say anything for a while, just took the card back and signed my payroll paperwork.

So Tuesday afternoon, after Bev went down to the break room to put her soup in the microwave, I pulled the original card for those two spaces.

It is dated 1971. I remember buying them when we were young enough to think forty years away was a country we would never reach. We paid four dollars a month, the way you buy a freezer on an installment plan from the Sears catalog.

There are two names on that card. Vernon and me.

Only one of them is mine.

I put it back in the drawer, face down, like I was hiding a bad hand of cards, and I drove home and watered my tomatoes and went to bed without turning on the television.

Wednesday I opened the perpetual care ledger. That is the book where we log who pays the upkeep on a grave so the grass does not go to briars and wild onion.

For eleven years, my husband’s row has been paid every spring. In cash. In an envelope left at the counter with no last name on it, just a crisp twenty and a ten tucked inside a folded piece of lined paper. I always assumed it was the church fund, an anonymous gift from the Ladies Auxiliary or someone Vernon helped out back when he ran the hardware store.

The initials in that ledger are not the church’s.

They are the initials of the name typed on the purchaser line of the transfer form that landed on my desk.

Thursday my son called. He calls when he wants something signed or when his wife needs me to take the dog for the weekend while they look at kitchen tile.

“Mom,” he said before I could even say hello. “Don’t get worked up about anything down at that office.”

“I never do,” I said.

“There’s a family that needs a space near the front,” he went on, his voice taking on that smooth, persuasive tone he uses when he’s closing a sale on a split-level with a damp basement. “We’re only moving Dad’s stone back one row. Better view from up there anyway. You’ll thank me later.”

“Will I,” I said.

“It’s just paperwork, Mom. Don’t go making a project out of it.”

Then he said the sentence I have been hearing all night with my eyes open against the dark ceiling.

“Nobody’s using the second one anyway.”

Somebody has been paying for that ground every spring for eleven years, in cash, at a counter where I sit three days a week. She has stood eight feet from me while I stamped receipts and never once said her name out loud, just slid the envelope across the formica and nodded like a stranger waiting for a stamp.

If that stamp goes down Friday at noon, my husband’s stone moves a row back, a stranger gets the ground beside him, and a card from 1971 goes into the dead file where nobody reads brown ink anymore.

This morning I laid the transfer form on the director’s desk and set the old card beside it, squared up neat, the way you put out coasters when company is coming.

He is a careful man who keeps his desk clear except for a ceramic mug and a stapler that never jams. He reads before he talks. He adjusted his bifocals and looked down at the transfer, then over at the heavy card stock from nineteen-seventy-one.

“Mrs. Prine,” he said, not looking up yet. “Who typed this purchaser line?”

“The funeral home, I assumed,” I told him.

“No, ma’am. That is this machine. That is this office.”

He put on his own glasses, the heavy black ones he wears for the ledger work. Then he turned the 1971 card over and read the back of it, which I never did, because I had put it face down and gone home.

He stopped. The room was so quiet I could hear the electric hum of the water cooler down the hall. He looked up at me over the top of his glasses, and he said, “Before I read this part out loud, ma’am, you had better tell me what your husband told you about the second name on this card.”

I did not say anything for a long moment. Through the frosted glass of his office door, I could see Bev walking past with a stack of new folders, her heels clicking on the linoleum.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “That’s why I’m asking you what’s written on the back.”

The director turned the card around so it faced me, though I already knew what ink lived there. He placed his finger on a line written in Vernon’s own hand from forty years ago, small and neat before his knuckles got stiff from the arthritis.

“It says the second plot was deeded to his sister,” the director said softly. “The one who went out west before you two were married. The one your family never talked about.”

I looked at the name on the card, and then at the name my son had typed on the transfer form, trying to clear out a space for a stranger while pretending nobody was using the ground.

“She died last month,” I said, the words finally settling into place like stones in a dry creek bed. “My son went out there to settle the estate.”

“And he didn’t mention she owned half of Vernon’s row?” the director asked.

“He didn’t mention a lot of things,” I said. “Including who he was selling it to.”

The director looked down at the transfer form with the county stamp waiting in the wire basket on his corner. He picked up his heavy brass seal, the one we use for final filings, and held it above the paper for a second before setting it back down without pressing.

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his leather chair until the springs groaned. “We can’t process a transfer without the surviving owner’s signature anyway, can we? And you haven’t signed this one.”

“No,” I said, reaching out to pull the transfer form back across the desk toward my side. “And I don’t think I will.”