A Secret Visit
As the bus drew near his destination, Sam began to wonder if he ought to have brought flowers. Not so much because there was any affection or respect in the matter, but purely as a matter of form. By the time he was off the bus, he had decided it was better he hadn’t. Flowers would have seemed hypocritical somehow. He could have driven here. In fact, he almost wondered why he hadn’t. He almost wondered why he was here. He had a simple answer to that: there was an itch that needed scratching. For weeks now he had had a nagging sense that he ought to make this visit; now he was finally making it just to make that feeling stop. What he didn’t know was why it felt so important to make this visit in the first place.
As he wandered through the rows of tombstones, he pondered that. He had no love for the man whose grave he’d come to see. He did not owe him anything, and it was far too late to ask his blessing. He pondered, too, why he had felt the need to keep this visit a secret. He knew why he hadn’t mentioned it to Charles: Charlie still had so many mixed feelings about his father, and Sam didn’t want to drag any painful memories back to the surface. Especially not this close to the wedding. But it would have been so much simpler if he had let himself ask Henry where exactly the grave was.
Eventually, he went to the cemetery’s office and asked for help. They were polite enough and before long he was staring at a stone that had his fiancé’s name on it. He hated that Charles had been named after his father. But after the initial shock of it, the name on the stone didn’t bother him. It was so coldly real and solid and dull…there was nothing at all to connect it to the bright, fiery man he loved except for the letters. He tried to connect it instead to Charlie’s father, but, he realized, he could not even remember that man’s face. He’d only met him once, and that had been a brief enough meeting.
Or perhaps not quite brief enough. Mr. Sumner had been there long enough to reduce Charles to a sobbing wreck (though he’d held himself together at least until the door had closed behind his father). Sam still seethed about that sometimes.
“Didn’t you know how incredible your son is? Didn’t you ever bother to notice that?”
The stone was silent.
“He still thinks about you. Sometimes he’ll get sad for no reason—disappear into himself, you know—and I can tell. I can tell he’s remembering some time when you said something that never stopped hurting, or let him down, or made it obvious you didn’t really love him. He deserved better than you.”
If stones could glare, Sam imagined this one was glaring at him. Or maybe it was just that he could almost see his own glare reflected in the mirror-bright polish of the still fresh rock. He tried again to recall the exact way self-righteous rage had shown in Mr. Sumner’s eyes. Instead, he could only recall the stories Charles had told him that night when he’d come back to Sam’s apartment for the first time. He could still feel how warm Charles had been as he held him that first time, trying to comfort him for a lifetime’s worth of invisible wounds. He could still feel the way he had trembled.
That had been the moment, he realized now, when he’d first lost his heart to him. He’d always had a soft spot for people who needed help, and that man, shaking in his arms because he’d never been given the love he craved, god, how could Sam have resisted that? That first twinge of love had grown deeper and stronger in a thousand ways since then, but where would they have been if Charles’s dad hadn’t dropped in that day? He gave the silent stone another sullen glare.
“Thank you,” he said grudgingly. Then he turned his back on the rock and walked away.
