He read a line from a poem
about, to paraphrase, an
adult child experiencing

the haunting, judgmental
presence of a mother long
dead in the ground under a

Swedish granite monument
in a cemetery two states
away and he started to

think about such a haunt-
ing and it, too, is a mother
and he thought about his

wife and her haunting, which
is from just down the road
at a cemetery she never visits

but is the ghost of her father
and when husband and wife are
in the reconciliation phase of

a domestic disagreement, when
the heat has cooled and breath-
ing comes more slowly, the

couple realizes, but once again,
that he is arguing with his
mother and she is struggling

with her father and, unfortun-
ately, he and her father are
both Bob, and so he thinks

perhaps he should go by his
middle name just to help
maintain boundaries, but

for the fact that his mother
and his wife have different
names and the ghost still…

won’t stay in the grave.