The Mortar Confession

It started two years ago, at my grandfather's grave, and I've never told a living soul how petty I actually am.

My ex-wife Sandra and I were at Greenlawn Cemetery in October of 2021, doing the paperwork shuffle after the estate finally cleared. My grandfather had been a stonemason for forty years in El Dorado, and before he died he carved his own headstone. It's gorgeous, honestly. A Celtic cross with a knotwork border, his name cut deep enough that rain hasn't softened it. I was standing there admiring it, telling Sandra for maybe the fifth time how he'd shaped every curve by hand, and she snorted.

"It's a rock, Gene," she said. "He made rocks for a living. Let it go."

That was it. That one sentence. We were already divorced by then, technically, just finalizing the last of the house stuff, but I stood there in the drizzle and decided she would one day regret saying that. Not violently. Nothing cruel. Just something she would think about.

I'm thirty-four now, an art history professor at a small college in Wichita, and I have spent two years nursing a grudge that most reasonable men would have flushed by month two. The plan changed shapes over the years. At one point I was going to commission a garden gnome carved in her likeness. At another, I wanted to buy the empty lot next to her house and install a gravel driveway she'd have to look at. But the idea that stuck, the one I actually started buying supplies for last month, was a tombstone. A fake one. An elaborate, beautifully carved, completely fictional tombstone installed on her own front lawn, where she'd have to walk past it every morning, dedicated to something so absurd she'd have to stop and read it every single time.

I needed help for that. Specifically, I needed the hands of my current girlfriend, who is a stonemason and who does not yet know any of this.

Which brings me to Tuesday.

I'd told Delilah we had a book club meeting. That was the cover story, and it was a bad one, because we don't have a book club. I invented it two weeks ago when I needed an excuse to be out of the house on a weeknight without telling her where I was going. She's thirty-one, she's observant for a living, and she was going to figure it out.

Her truck pulled into my driveway at six forty. Rain had been coming down since four, that flat gray Wichita drizzle that soaks you without committing to being an actual storm. I watched through the garage window as she got out in her coveralls, work boots, hair plastered flat, carrying her good chisel wrapped in a shop towel.

She came in through the side door instead of ringing the bell, which she does because she says doorbells are for strangers.

"Okay," she said, holding up the chisel. "So explain to me why you need me to bring a half-inch chisel to a book club."

"I didn't say you needed to bring it. I said you were coming from work."

"Gene. You texted me, and I quote, bring the half-inch." She set it on the workbench and shook rain off her sleeves. "What book club meeting has a chisel requirement?"

"It's a discussion book," I said. "A hands-on book."

She stared at me. Delilah has a way of staring that makes you feel like a specimen. "There are four of us, supposedly. Names. Give me one name of another member."

"Tom."

"Tom what?"

"Tom... Grieves."

"Tom Grieves." She pulled off a boot and dumped water out of it onto my garage floor. "I looked him up, by the way. There's no Tom Grieves in the club roster you emailed me, because there is no roster, because you pasted the email from a template and forgot to delete the part about snacks from the March meeting. It's October, Gene."

"Well," I said.

"Also your HOA sent you a notice about your grass, and it was sitting on top of a receipt from Felfa's Hardware, dated last Thursday, for epoxy and a stone sealant. So." She crossed her arms. "Either you're restoring something in secret, which would be fine and also hurtful because I restore things for a living, or you're lying to me about a book club."

The rain hammered the roof. Somewhere down the cul-de-sac a grill cover flapped. I did the math real quick on which lie had better survival odds, and neither did, so I went with the third option.

"Do you want to just go to the hardware store with me?" I said. "I need a mortar and pestle."

"A what?"

"Mortar and pestle. For grinding."

"For grinding what? You don't cook. You microwave oatmeal and call it dinner."

"I might start cooking."

"Gene." She sat down on my workbench stool, which groaned under her the way it groans under me. "We have been dating a year. I met you at a faculty mixer wearing a name tag, I have spent approximately two hundred nights at this house, and I have never once seen you use a stove for anything that didn't come frozen."

"That's fair."

"So either you suddenly took up cooking on a Tuesday, or the mortar and pestle is for something else, and I'm gonna guess it's the something else, because you're doing the thing where you stand with your back to me and organize screws that are already organized."

I turned around. She was right about the screws. I put one back.

"Can it wait until after the store?" I asked. "It's kind of a long story and I'd rather tell it standing in front of the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing I'm buying."

She let out a breath through her nose, the sound she makes when she's decided to let me dig my own hole. "Fine. But I'm driving, because your wipers are garbage and you refuse to fix them."

"That's a separate issue."

"It's the same issue. It's the issue of you not maintaining things."

We took her truck. The hardware store is eleven minutes from my house if you catch the lights on 13th, and we caught every single one, which gave her time to narrate her day. A client in Andover wants a limestone lintel restored and the client's husband keeps suggesting she just "paint over it," and each time she tells this story her grip tightens on the wheel. I like her stories. I was barely listening, which she noticed.

"You're not hearing a word," she said as we pulled into the lot.

"I heard lintel."

"You heard the word lintel."

Inside, the store smelled like fertilizer and rubber, and there was a puddle by the entrance nobody had mopped. I walked with purpose toward the back, because a man with purpose looks like he belongs in a hardware store buying a mortar and pestle, and Delilah followed at her own pace, reading endcaps.

The stone and concrete aisle is aisle nine. It has bags of Quikrete, chisels, trowels, sealers, and, on a pegboard near the bottom, a small and frankly insulting selection of actual mortar and pestles. Kitchen ones are up front by the cookware. These were the heavy ones, the stone-working sort, used for crushing pigment or grinding small batches of mortar mix, and I picked up the largest one they had. It was black granite, about eight pounds, and it felt good in my hand, which is a stupid thing to admit but there it is.

Delilah came around the corner, looked at what I was holding, then looked at the price tag, then looked at me.

"Thirty-eight dollars," she said. "For a rock bowl and a rock stick."

"It's granite."

"I work with granite. I can get granite free. Gene, what is happening right now? You don't cook. You have never expressed interest in crushing anything. Is this a midlife thing? You're thirty-four, that's early."

"It's for a project."

"What project?"

I turned the pestle over in my hands. Behind us a man tested paint stirrers against his palm, whack, whack, whack, and the rain picked up against the roof panels.

"The project," I said, "is a tombstone."

Her eyebrows went up. "Whose tombstone?"

"That's the long story part."

"You're buying a thirty-eight dollar granite mortar and pestle and a fake tombstone is the short version?"

"No," I said, "the mortar and pestle is for the tombstone. The tombstone is for Sandra."

Delilah went very still, the way she does when she's reading a stone for flaws. "Your ex-wife Sandra."

"Yes."

"The one who, and I remember this exactly, you said quote 'made my grandfather's life work sound like a hobby.'"

"She said it was a rock," I told her. "He made rocks for a living. Let it go. Her words."

Delilah set down the sealant she'd picked up off the shelf, put both hands on her hips, and stood there in aisle nine of Felfa's Hardware while the paint tester man whacked his stirrers, and I watched her decide whether to laugh or to kill me.

"Okay," she finally said. "Okay. Start at the beginning. And you're buying that thing, because now I have to know."

I paid for the mortar and pestle and we drove back through the rain, which had not let up since four. Delilah carried the granite in through the side door like it weighed nothing, which for her it basically didn't, and set it on the workbench next to the half-inch chisel she'd brought wrapped in a shop towel.

"So," she said, pulling off her boots and lining them up by the door, which she always does, "tombstone for Sandra. Start talking."

"Can I do it in order?"

"You've been weird for two weeks, Gene. I've been patient. You're doing it out of order."

I put the mortar and pestle down on the bench and wiped the price sticker off with my thumb. "Okay. Two years ago, October 2021, I went to Greenlawn to visit my grandfather's grave. Sandra came along, because we were still in that phase where she came along to things to prove she was being reasonable about the divorce."

"Charming phase."

"She looked at his headstone, the one he carved himself, the Celtic cross with the knotwork border, forty years a stonemason in El Dorado, and she said, quote, he made rocks for a living. And then she said let it go, which wasn't even about the headstone, that was about me talking about him, but it all came out in one lump."

Delilah pulled a stool over and sat down on it backward, arms crossed over the top. "And you've been chewing on that for two years."

"For one of those years I was dating you."

"So one year of solo chewing and one year of chewing behind my back."

"That's not... okay, yes, technically."

She drummed her fingers on the stool back. "Go on. What's the scheme? Because a mortar and pestle is not a scheme, it's a scheme accessory."

I took a breath. "Last month I started buying supplies. Litho crayons, pigment, a rubber mold kit. The plan is to make a memorial plaque, cast it, carve it properly, with an epitaph, and put it on Sandra's lawn."

There was a pause. Somewhere outside a garage door rattled up on the next street over.

"On her lawn," Delilah said.

"On her front lawn."

"As in her actual house."

"She lives on Cardinal Court. Corner lot, very visible."

"And the epitaph says what, exactly?"