Excerpt from Driver

Driver appears in my new collection of short stories, The Endpoint of Sentience.

It never occurred to Regina to wonder how the driver found this place - she had never looked at a map or an atlas and had no obvious navigation system in the car. When the car pulled up alongside the right series of plots, though, she had to ask. "How did you know just where to go?"
"This was high on the list of probable visits, ma'am."
"I don't understand."
"A good driver anticipates the wishes of their client, ma'am. Perhaps I can help you carry your flowers?"
"No," she said, still thinking. "I need to do this myself." She had to take three trips, back and forth. The grave was about two hundred yards from the curb, and the ground was soft and damp. The well-tended grass kept it from being muddy.  Really, the place was parklike, which made her happy. She knew Davy was gone, could not appreciate the beauty all around him now, but nevertheless she remembered how much he had liked running and playing in the park. His short life over so quickly, so quickly. On the second trip she started to tear up. By the third, grief flowed freely.
She remembered the first time Davy had seen a lily, before he was even old enough to proclaim his wonder. It was in his eyes, though, in his grasping hands. His momma had let his hair grow out and it formed a halo around his head. Everyone who saw him told him what great hair he had. It was like a lion's mane, though he was too young to be much of a lion. Still just a cub. Just a baby. My baby's baby.
She placed the flowers around his little headstone. Even back then things hadn't been so good. His little life deserved more than the cheap bit of rock marking his place in the soil. The flowers helped. It didn't look like anyone had come by recently. There were no older flowers to sweep away, little evidence of human activity except that the grass was mown. At least the church took good care of the place. Grass, trees, birds, sometimes rabbits, all profligate life in this place of loss.
A candy wrapper marred the view, caught in a tree not too many steps away. She wandered over there, snatched it down, stuffed it into her purse.
She wished there were a bench to sit on, some place she could rest and think and feel her sadness undistracted by the insistent demands of the mortal coil. Her feet hurt and her back ached and the damp soaked into her stockings. But she stood as best she could, did her thinking with one hand rested on the cheap stone. If I had a thousand dollars, I'd fix him up something better, if his momma would let me. And there was the rub, the real rub. Not my daughter, not no more, just his momma.
Time passed irresistibly. Eventually she felt like she had done all she could here. She didn't feel better exactly, but maybe she felt worse in a way that mattered. She plodded back over towards the car, saw a hearse pulling in over at the front gate, three more limousines behind it. A procession. Always more customers, and never mind the economy. Less than an hour had passed since they arrived.
God is good, God is good.