Your mother was much older than I expected; already shriveled and slippered. In the kitchen, she served us Minute Maid lemonade, which we spiked with Old Grandad when she’d shuffled off for a nap. We drank quickly, swallowing shards of ice. When we’d finished, you took my hand and pulled me out of the back door into the yard where I stopped short against a gleaming slab surrounded by daisies.

“Granite,” you said, and I remembered an essay I’d received from a student—one in which he claimed to have been “taken for granite.” The other granite—that by my foot—was mottled like moribund flesh, flecked with silver. When I lifted my eyes from it, I saw that the garden was filled with headstones. You told me they marked the graves of your mother’s cats, all of which had died of natural causes. Tapping on a stone with your steel-capped toe, you said, “Here’s my old ferret.”

When I let go of your hand and bent down for a closer look, I saw that the dead animals had people names: Peter, Rosetta, and Gemma.

“My dad’s an engraver,” you explained. “He’s the best in the county.”

Without asking if I wanted to see, you threaded me around the gravestones and led me into your father’s workshop. The machinery was silent, but I felt the man’s presence as keenly as the whiskey in my blood. I saw a tarnished glove, a drill cap, a wad of blue Kleenex, a layer of black silt on the workbench. You touched the glove, ran a finger through the silt. With your back to me, you said, “Dad’s been teaching me how. I could do one for you—if you want.”

“For me?” I must have sounded appalled, but you didn’t seem to notice.

“Dad already made one for each of us. Look.”

You pulled aside a shroud and there they were: your name, his, and hers, each carved deep into a glossy shoulder of stone.