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breakfast nook is covered with stacks of paper plates, towers of Styrofoam cups, pick-up-stick piles of plastic silverware.
    Rick Van Varken, balancing a plate of three-bean salad on top of his can of Bud, finds his young widowed neighbor on the porch. In the field beyond the willow and the old chicken coop, two new layer houses sit half built. “They’re coming along nice,” Rick says. Even with a bath and a spritz of cologne he smells like his hogs.
    â€œThey should be finished by now,” Calvin says. “Pullets are coming in five weeks.”
    Rick chases a slippery kidney bean with his plastic fork. “Your father would be proud of you. You’ve done a fantastic job.”
    Calvin doesn’t answer. He just stares at the half-built layer houses.
    â€œYou hear that Dewey Fowler’s selling his farm?” Rick asks.
    Calvin nods.
    â€œSome developer wants to build two hundred houses on it. Concrete streets and sidewalks and everything.”
    Calvin nods.
    â€œLots of families selling off land in that part of the township,” Rick says. A cucumber slice slides off his plate and lands in the cuff of his suit pants. “Christ, would you look at that.”
    Calvin doesn’t look. “What if a developer dangled a wheelbarrow full of money in front of you, Rick? Would you sell?”
    Rick Van Varken spears the wayward cucumber slice with his plastic fork and eats it. “No way.” Having succeeded in getting Calvin’s mind off Jeanie for a few minutes, Rick goes inside. He is replaced by Norman Marek, who squeaks across the porch with a small clay pot of scraggly vines. “Sorry I missed the funeral,” he says.
    â€œThat’s okay,” Calvin answers.
    Norman holds out the pot. He’s embarrassed. “Bob Gallinipper made me drive all the way to Indiana for these. He wanted you to have them.”
    Calvin takes the pot and examines the sick-looking plant inside. “He wanted me to have a strawberry plant?”
    â€œWild strawberry,” says Norman. “Bob wanted me to tell you it’s from his grandfather’s grave. That he planted them himself when he was a kid. I guess he and his grandfather used to pick strawberries together. Bob’s pretty sentimental about family stuff. He says he still goes to the cemetery every spring to eat wild strawberries with his ‘grandpop.’ Almost makes you want to cry, doesn’t it?”
    A week later Calvin takes Rhea to the cemetery in Tuttwyler. They take the strawberry plant with them. The grave is still covered with the fancy cut flowers from the funeral home. Calvin pushes them aside and with his bare hands digs a hole in the dirt. He gently removes the strawberry plant from the pot, along with the rich Indiana soil it’s nestled in, and puts it in the hole. He rakes Ohio soil around the plant and pats it until it’s firm. “Every spring we’ll come here and eat strawberries with Mommy,” he promises.
    â€œI like strawberries,” Rhea says.
    Calvin doubts the strawberry plant will live. December in Ohio is no time to plant anything. But it’s a good thought, eating strawberries every spring with Jeanie and their Rhea. A good thought.
    A memorial stone has been ordered but it won’t be delivered until spring, until after the ground thaws and settles. It will be a gray granite stone with Jeanie’s name on one side and Calvin’s on the other. The date of Calvin’s death won’t be chiseled in, but the date of Jeanie’s will be:
CASSOWARY
JEANETTE
CALVIN
LOVING WIFE
DEVOTED HUSBAND
1950 ~ 1979
1949 ~
    It will be one of several gray-granite Cassowary gravestones in the southwest corner of the old cemetery on South Mill, in a neat line just inside the black iron fence, by a bed of myrtle that stays green all winter.
    There is the gravestone of Henry and second wife, Camellia:
CASSOWARY
HENRY D .
 CAMELLIA E .
BORN MAY 1830
BORN APRIL