The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Page B

hello to one of them, her old friend Margie Reynolds.
    “Hi, Margie.” She cleared her throat and folded her hands together at her waist. “You’ll be pleased to hear that Ellen is doing her usual great job as mayor. That girl is going to be governor some day, I swear. Quentin’s okay, I guess, but we hardly see him anymore. He seems to keep busy with his medicine, and not much else, as far as I can tell. I wish I could tell you that Abby has fallen sensibly in love with my Rex, and that they are going to get married, and that they’re planning to have grandbabies for you and me, but you’d never believe me, if I tried to put that one over on you.” Verna sighed. Neither of her sons, not Patrick nor Rex, had married yet. “By the time I get grandchildren, Margie, I’ll be so old they’ll think I’m already dead.” She purposely avoided telling her late friend about certain recent activities between her
older
son and Margie’s younger daughter, not wishing Margie to roll uncomfortably in her grave.
    “Have you seen Nadine yet?” she inquired. “You know she’s here, right?”
    Verna looked around, aware that she’d sound like a nut to anybody who heard her.
    If the fog had ears, or there was anybody over the hill, she couldn’t see them.
    “Well, I’ll see you later, honey,” she told Margie Reynolds. She started to walk away, but then turned back, and said, in a voice that suddenly trembled, “I still miss you. You oughtn’t to have gone so soon.”
    Ellen and Abby’s mom had been only fifty-eight when the cancer took her.
    Next, Verna paid her respects to the more recently buried Nadine Newquist.
    “I hope you’re back in your right mind again, Nadine,” she said, rather more sharply than she had intended to speak. She told herself it was only because she was trying to pull herself together and get the shakiness out of her voice. “I’m glad you’re out of your suffering, but I’m sorry you had to go that way.” Reluctantly, she dredged up an insincere sentiment, just so she wouldn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. “I miss you, too.”
Like hell,
she thought, giving up all pretense of feeling the same about Nadine as she had felt about Margie. It was almost shocking what a relief it was not to have to endure Nadine’s barbed wit anymore. If anybody in the world missed that, then Verna was a monkey’s uncle. “Tom seemed kind of lost for a while without you,” she lied. The judge seemed like a man with a heavy burden lifted, as did many relatives of Alzheimer’s victims after their loved ones died. She and Nathan had Tom over for dinner once a week, and it was good to hear the big man laugh again.
    “It’s a good thing that he’s got Jeff to take care of.”
    As if he ever does,
Verna thought, but also didn’t say. No use worrying dead people.
    Briskly enough to be almost rude, Verna walked on toward the real goal of her morning.
    On this day, with the snow long gone, the simple gravestone stood fully revealed:
Peace Be Unto You, 1987.
While Verna was in the hospital in Emporia, Nadine and Margie had led the community drive to raise money for the girl’s burial and stone. Then Nadine had topped off the donations with enough extra funds to give her bragging rights to the available virtue. But it was a nice stone, with a hint of pink in its color. The McLaughlins, who owned the funeral parlor and the cemetery, had donated one of the very last plots in the picturesque old part, so there could be a real headstone, and not just a nondescript marker. That’s what everybody had wanted—something that stood tall and substantial, as if to verify that even an unidentified girl had once been real. Everybody had cared, was how Verna remembered it. Everybody had felt awful about what had happened to the girl, and even worse about the idea that nobody had claimed her. The girl had died a stranger among strangers, and so the kindhearted strangers had buried her. That’s how Verna was determined