I visited my daughter’s grave every Sunday, blaming myself for the night I didn’t pick her up. Then the groundskeeper told me another woman had been visiting with daisies and apologies. I thought I already knew how my daughter died, but I was wrong about who’d buried the truth.
I cried at my daughter’s grave every Sunday for a month before Otis, the cemetery groundskeeper, finally stopped pretending he didn’t see me.
That fourth Sunday, I brought white roses again because the florist had called them “proper.” Maya would have made a face at that.
My seventeen-year-old daughter liked yellow daisies, chipped nail polish, and jeans with paint on the knees.
I cried at my daughter’s grave every Sunday.
But Maya was gone before I could bring her daisies on some ordinary birthday. Gone before graduation or the art scholarship letter. And gone before I could take back the last thing I said to her.
That night, she’d asked me to pick her up because she was tired and scared of driving in the rain.
