I do my homework in a cemetery. It's very quiet, so it's easy to concentrate. No one bugs you in a cemetery. Sometimes I get distracted by someone who is crying. It's very hard to do math or finish a geography quiz when someone is crying. That's what happened the other day. There was a woman, I guess she was my mother's age. It was hard to tell. She was wearing a lot of makeup, so she might have been fifty hoping everyone would think she's forty (as if forty isn't old). She was standing in front of a tombstone and crying and crying and crying. She sounded like a wounded animal with its leg caught in a leg trap. I've seen pictures: the animals have to chew their leg off to escape. This woman wasn't chewing on her leg but she might as well have been for all the racket she was making. I was going to go up to her and say, Excuse me, but can you keep things down? I'm trying to finish my math homework. But I bet she wouldn't have heard me. I've noticed that people who are very upset - and cemeteries attract loads of them - people who are very upset don't hear very well. They nod their head and they may try to speak, but you can tell they don't really hear a thing. Their minds are elsewhere. (That's what Miss Migliarisi used to tell me in Grade 2: You're mind is elsewhere, T-. Migliarisi is Italian for a thousand smiles, which is a complete joke because she hardly ever smiled. Her name should have been Cinqiarisi, which I think is how you say five smiles in Italian.) So there's no point talking to someone whose mind is elsewhere. That's why I didn't go up to Woman Wailing Like a Wounded Animal. There was no point. And if there's no point, then it's pointless, like a pencil without lead, which is useless. As far as I'm concerned, pointless and useless mean the same thing. (Though no one has ever said You're pointless to me.)

I was doing some fractions - which, like the taste of sour tomatoes, I've learned to like - when Woman Wailing came up to me. Did I ask her to walk up to me? No. Was I sitting next to a sign that said Please Interrupt? No. Was I minding my own business? Yes. It didn't make one iota of difference (Iota sounds like the name of an Indian tribe, but it isn't.) She came right up to me, sniffing, strangling this tissue with one hand.

Excuse me.

I was going to pretend I was deaf. I do that sometimes. I pretend I can't hear what people are saying. They get frustrated and then they know what it's like when you speak but your words disappear like magic - poof! - only you weren't doing a magic trick so there's no one there to clap when it's over. So instead of pretending to be deaf I ignored her.

Excuse me.

I looked up. The makeup around her eyes was all runny. It looked like she had been beaten up. Which is sort of true. She had been beaten up by her sadness. If she was stronger than her sadness she wouldn't have been crying and wailing. Not everyone cries at funerals. There's such a thing as invisible tears. Woman Wailing had been pummeled by her sadness. That was plain for anyone to see. Her sadness had pinned her to the ground and done a real number on her.

I'm busy.

I turned over my page of fractions even though I didn't have to. If you look like you're busy people get the message that you don't have time to be interrupted.

I can see that. But I was wondering...

She stopped talking, like something was caught in her throat. Maybe she was hoping I would feel bad for her. She turned away. I stared at my fraction sheet.

What's your name?

I lied and told her my name was Conrad, which was the name I saw on a tombstone.

Do you come here a lot, Conrad?

Yes. I like cemeteries because they're quiet. And they are full of half-truths. A half-truth is like a fraction. You get half of the truth, which is a lie, because you don't even get that in a cemetery. All you get is a name, and when the person died, and a few nice words about them. Beloved mother. Loving father. Cherished daughter. What does that tell you? Beloved? Not all the time. Cherished? More when they were dead than alive. A tombstone can't give you the whole picture. It doesn't tell you about all the times Loving Father teased his Devoted Son in front of everyone. Maybe Devoted Son melted every time he was teased so that by the time he died you could have poured him into his coffin. You'll never read that on a tombstone. That's why I like coming to the cemetery. It reminds me that the world is full of half-truths and quarter-truths and 1/1000 truths.

Sometimes.

Woman Wailing smiled a little bit. I could see she had something up her sleeve.

Once a week?

She was beginning to bug me. You don't have to know someone long before they start bugging you. They can bug you before they even say a single word. She had said twenty-five words. That was all I needed.

Depends.

She crouched down to get closer to me, like I was the wounded one and not her.

Would you come here once a week if I paid you?

She pointed to where she had been standing and bawling her eyes out. She told me it's where her mother was buried. She wanted me to sit by her mother's grave once a week to keep her company. Like I'm supposed to read to her or something? No thank you.

You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is sit there.

Woman Wailing said if I sat by her mother's tombstone once a week for half an hour she would pay me ten dollars a week.

Twenty-five.

I didn't want to do it. I knew she wouldn't pay me twenty-five dollars a week to sit by her mother's tombstone while I wrote an essay on The Black Plague.

Thirty.

She opened her purse and fished out thirty dollars. She gave me the money and her business card and pointed to her mother's tombstone.

You can start next week.

She told me to drop by her office once a month and she would pay me.

How did she know I would show up every week?

How did she know I would show up at all?

I trust you, Conrad.

What she meant to say was, I trust people with thick glasses who look retarded. She didn't say that. She didn't have the courage. She didn't have the gumption (which is another word for guts, but no one ever told me I hate your bloody gumption).

She said Thank you and walked back to her mother's grave. She didn't even think of introducing us.