I went every Sunday.
At first, I went because staying home was worse. The house was too quiet on Sundays. Caleb used to sleep until noon on Sundays and then come downstairs with his hair sticking up and eat cereal standing at the counter. I couldn’t stand being in that kitchen at noon on a Sunday.
So I went to see him instead.
It became a routine. Every Sunday morning, I bought a coffee from the same little shop on Elm Street. The girl at the counter learned my order. Medium, black, one sugar. I drove across town and parked under the same row of old maple trees. And I walked the same path to Caleb’s grave.
Sometimes I brought flowers. Sometimes I didn’t.
Sometimes I talked.
“I saw your friend Marcus at the grocery store,” I’d tell him. “He’s working at the bank now. He asked about you. I didn’t know what to say.”
Or, “Aunt Joanne made enough food for forty people at Thanksgiving again. There were nine of us.”
Once, after my car battery died in the cemetery parking lot, I stood beside his headstone and said, “You would’ve laughed at me. I spent twenty minutes looking for the hood release. Twenty minutes, Caleb.”
Talking to a grave sounds strange.
Until you have somebody inside one. Then it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
About four months ago, I started noticing the dog.
The first time I saw him, I figured he belonged to another visitor. He was lying in the grass near Caleb’s grave, and I looked around for an owner. There was nobody.
He was medium-sized. A scruffy mixed breed with uneven brown and gray fur that looked like somebody had tried to trim it with kitchen scissors. One ear stood straight up. The other flopped over at the tip. He was thin. Not starving. But thin enough that I wondered how often he ate.
He didn’t have a collar.
When I got closer, he didn’t bark. He just lifted his head and watched me.
“Hey there,” I said.
His dark eyes followed me as I walked up.
And that’s when I realized exactly where he’d been lying.
Right next to Caleb’s headstone. Not near it. Not somewhere in the general area.
Right beside it. With his body pressed up against the stone.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.