About a year after her husband's death, Mrs. Herbert, an older woman who was born in 1914, visits his gravesite with flowers. She plans her visit the day before Memorial Day because she does not want to be there when the cemetery is packed. At the cemetery, Mrs. Herbert meets a girl in her twenties, a young mother who has come to visit her father. Though her father died when she was a child and she hardly remembers him, the girl tells Mrs. Herbert that she has been seeking advice from her father since her recent divorce. She does not know how to go forward, whether she should find another man to take care of her or whether it would be better for her daughters if she remained single. The girl lies on her father's grave so that she can talk to him and hear his responses. She tells Mrs. Herbert that her father drowned trying to save a drunk man from drowning himself. Mrs. Herbert thinks not about her husband during this encounter but about her husband's brother Homer, who died an alcoholic, alone. Her husband and their family member Lloyd had to cremate Homer because they could not travel with his body to bury him, so Homer's ashes are in the mausoleum, close to where her husband later picked his burial plot. Mrs. Herbert's husband was a drinker, too, but he did not fall into the same "bad company" as Homer and was saved from slipping into bad habits. But one time when her husband drank, he began yelling at Mrs. Herbert and smashed her china outside in front of the neighbors. After that incident, Mrs. Herbert was content spending her nights with her husband in silence. She realizes as she reminisces that she, too, was "bad company;" she was less of a wife to her husband and more of a tool, a meal provider. Even as he was dying, Mrs. Herbert did not break the silence. In fact, when they fought during his final days, Mrs. Herbert told her husband how she had bought a burial plot for herself by the sea, even though her husband had already bought her the plot next to where he was to be buried, far away from the sea. She let her husband die not knowing whether she was to be buried next to him or by the sea. After this startling moment of clarity, Mrs. Herbert does not visit her husband's grave for a month, but the next time she does, she sees the girl again and gives her some flowers for the girl's father. The girl places some at Homer's mausoleum plaque and some at her father's grave. She tells Mrs. Herbert that she will remain single, that she will be free, and she was able to gather the answer from talking to her deceased father. After the girl leaves, Mrs. Herbert lays next to her husband's grave to seek some of the clarity that the girl had, but she gets none. Though she tells her husband she chooses to be buried next to him, she realizes it is too late, and her husband will never hear anything she says to him. She is no better than her alcoholic brother-in-law Homer who died alone in a motel room.