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happened in his upbringing by Claire, though he missed every second of what his life might have been, the uncertainty never far from his mind.
    Kowalczyk's execution prompted this visit. Nick Byrnes's odd question implying that someone had protected Mason from the truth about his parents' deaths hung over his image of Nick, Harry, and Mary as they had watched Kowalczyk die. Mason had never doubted the story Claire told him. That his father lost control on a rainy summer night, his car slicing through a guard rail, down an embankment, both his parents dead when rescuers reached them. Now Nick's question rose like a tide through Mason's memory, leaving him unsettled.
    There was a rock on the center of the arched headstone, a smooth, flat oval that would have skipped forever across flat water. Leaving a small rock on a headstone was a Jewish tradition, a reminder to the deceased that they have not been forgotten, one of the few traditions Mason had picked up in his nontraditional upbringing.
    Mason picked up the rock, rubbing his fingers across a surface too polished for the rock to have been plucked from the ground. Whoever left the rock had brought it with them. Claire had never left a rock on the headstone to the Masons' memory, rejecting the practice as she did virtually every other religious ritual.
    Claire was as strong an advocate of Jewish traditions of social justice as anyone could be, though she had no interest in the theology. God, she said, knew where to find her if He was looking for her. Mason doubted that Claire had mellowed in her antagonism toward spiritual faith, though he never quite understood its origins. He sometimes imagined Claire having a fight with God, calling it quits because God was a sore loser.
    Who had left the rock, Mason wondered? He had no other family besides Claire and could think of no one who might have visited his parents' grave, leaving the rock behind as a calling card. He examined it again, turning it over in his hand as he turned over Nick's question in his mind, finding answers to neither, leaving the rock where he found it.
    Several sections over from where he stood near the top of the slope a blue awning had been erected at the site of a fresh grave. The excavation complete, two gravediggers were setting up chairs for the mourners. They'd stuck two shovels firmly into the mound of dirt next to the grave so that mourners could sprinkle soil onto the casket after it was lowered into the ground, a final good-bye. It was not yet eight o'clock and the gravediggers were glad to be finished, the sun already bearing down at the start of another blistering summer day.
    The city was roasting in a heat wave that had boosted temperatures into triple digits seven out of the last ten days. Humidity to match the temperature multiplied into a misery index that was off the charts. The sky was painfully blue. People were dying and the forecast was for more of the same. Mason had a feeling the gravediggers would be busy.
    Curious whether the men might have seen someone deposit the rock on his parents' headstone, Mason ambled their way. The gravediggers, one black and one white, were sitting in the shade of the awning on the chairs they had just arranged, taking long pulls on water jugs.
    "Bet you're glad this one's done," Mason said.
    "You got that right," the white man said. "Funeral's not till eleven. You're early."
    "It's not my funeral," Mason said. "I was just visiting my folks' grave. Back over there," he said, pointing. "John and Linda Mason," he added.
    "Double plot," the black man said. "Don't dig too many of them. Most people, they go one at a time."
    "How long you guys worked out here?" Mason asked.
    "Me and Marty," the black man answered, "we been here ten years. Ain't that right, Marty?"
    "You got that right, Albert," Marty said, wiping his wrist across his mouth.
    "Don't suppose you might have noticed anyone else visiting my parents' graves. Someone left a nice rock on the