The Map Develops

She has been standing at the same spot for twenty minutes. The ceremony ended. The others drifted back to their cars, back to the cookouts, back to the afternoon that Memorial Day becomes once the formal obligation is discharged. She did not move. She is still there, in front of the stone, in the Florida heat, with the small flag the veterans' organization placed this morning standing in the ground to her left.

Her husband has been in that ground for four years. He was not a combat veteran. He served two years in peacetime and then came home and built a life and died at sixty-three of a heart that gave out too soon. The flag is for the service. The stone is for the life. The hole in her chest is for neither of those things. It is for him.

She knows the standard answers. She was raised in a church that gave them to her without being asked. He is in a better place. He is with the Lord. You will see him again. She believes all of it, in the way that people believe things that have not yet been tested by twenty minutes standing in front of a stone in the heat. What she does not have is the map. She does not know what better place means. She does not know what with the Lord looks like for a man whose body is in the ground six feet from where she is standing. She does not know what the interval between now and the resurrection feels like from the inside.

This chapter is for her. It is also, eventually, for everyone. But it begins with her, because the map that is about to be drawn is not an academic exercise. It is the answer to the question she is asking in front of that stone.

Where is he right now?