The Grave She Bought Him

She bought him a grave. Now the county wants it dug up.

Willa Teague buries people for a living, and she is good at it. Six years

ago she turned that skill on herself: she bought a plot on the hill above

Anvil, paid a man to cut a stone, and told her daughter her father had died

before she was born.

He had not died. Roan Ballard was nineteen miles up the road, president of

the Anvil Motorcycle Club, married to somebody else, and he had known there

was a child for all six of those years.

Now a gas company wants a road through that hillside, and a hundred and

forty-one graves have to come up. Willa is the only licensed funeral

director in the county, so she is the one who has to go back, stand in the

chapel where the club holds church, and open the ground she filled with

nothing at all.

Eleven of those graves were never registered with the state. Roan signed the

permits. So did she, the first at twenty-five and the last at twenty-eight,

to keep her father's funeral home open. When the backhoes start, the county

will find out what the club put in that hill and whose names are on the

paperwork.

He wants to come back. She has a six-year-old who has been laying flowers on

an empty grave since she was three, and a stone with his name on it somebody

has to explain. It will cost him more than he has, and she is never going to

tell him she forgives him.

A small-town novel about grief, betrayal, and the price of coming back, set

in a West Virginia funeral home and the club that runs the cemetery behind

it.

Reader notes: A closed-door book. Three intimate scenes, all off the page,

and almost no profanity. Contains infidelity, the death of a parent, a

shooting, imprisonment, and a child lied to about her father. The couple end

the book together, but not where they started, and forgiveness is not part

of the arrangement.