The day they pledged themselves to each other, she gave him her name, and after he’d looked at it a moment, he put it away in an old cigar box saying, “Well, there’s no need for this old thing anymore.”  He gave her an old one he was using, saying, “It’s been in the family forever.  We can share.”  But he didn’t, really.

He worked hard daily, and brought in what they needed.  She gave him two children but he had work to do, so he didn’t notice them until they were gone.

Women outlasted men in those days, but not him.  Him nine years older than her, and still rising every morning, steady as a train, and off to work.  Her children had moved on now.  She didn’t listen to the little stings of abandonment and loneliness she felt in the mornings.  Her steps got smaller, her hands more frail.  He came home, and the house got quieter.  She still felt alone.

The day she died, she asked to be buried on the hill near the old pines.  “Together at last,” she said, and thought of the pleasant grass where she and her husband would spend the rest of their eternity, finally together.  “I’ll be waiting on you, my handsome boy,” she said, smiling though the weakness that seeped into her bones.

They buried her there.  She asked for no name on the stone, just “Junie, his wife.”

He did grieve, out loud in his silent house, for the promises he’d broken her.  All time seemed wrapped up in an eyeblink of the silence he’d born her.  Three weeks of his empty house, and he packed his things, and went back to the old hills where his fathers had lived and died.  He found an old sweetheart, widowed herself, and re-married.

He told himself, in his last moments, that Junie would understand all the things he’d been afraid to tell her, and why he didn’t join her.  In the end, it was just more one broken promise, after all.

But the stone still sits, in silence, like the open air of a question just before it’s answered.