Jim Henderson was trying to concentrate, but couldn’t. He was supposed to be studying for a test on “Julius Caesar” tomorrow, but was brooding about Eileen Robertson’s having dumped him for the senior class president. Caesar had been stabbed in the back by the conspirators and he’d been betrayed by his girlfriend, a greater tragedy.

As Jim sat at the desk in his bedroom, the Folger text of the play, with all the arcane Elizabethan words helpfully explained on the left-hand pages, shimmered before him like a desert mirage. Eileen was gone, no girl would ever love him, he was going to flunk the Caesar test, drop out of school and spend his life stuck in the jerkwater town of Sierra Groves.

He put the book down and called Eileen, but it went straight to her tantalizingly breathy voice mail. Louis, his best friend, wasn’t picking up either. Jim decided to go for a walk.

Tomorrow, March 15, was the day Mr. Rivakowski had set for the Caesar exam for the junior-year English class at Sierra Groves High. “Beware the Ides of March,” he said, eyes glinting mischievously as the bell rang and students scurried off to their next class.

Sierra Groves was a small town in the foothills on the road from Fresno to the High Sierra. Much of its commerce consisted of gas stations, motels and souvenir shops dispensing t-shirts that read “My parents went to Yosemite and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

Jim had an after-school job working as a cashier in one of them. Tourists would  tell him how lucky he was to live in such beautiful country. He was desperately eager to leave town and go away to college, but would just smile and politely agree. 

The town was refreshingly cool when the Central Valley below baked in the summer, but now, with spring only a week off, the humid chill could still settle into you. Just before midnight, Jim put on a sweatshirt and jacket to ward off the cold and left the house. He trudged through his neighborhood, the star-speckled sky looming above, cricket sonata chirping, air pungent with the aroma of incense cedars.

After several minutes of rudderless drifting, he found himself at the gate of the town cemetery. Unlike most of his friends, he didn’t find cemeteries creepy; to him they were oddly calming. Grandpa Jim on his father’s side, after whom he was named, and Grandma Cecile were buried there, as was his mother’ s mom, Grandma Susan. He didn’t like Susan, having found her humorless and hectoring, but Jim and Cecile had always been friendly and he liked to visit their graves and talk to them, still feeling the welcome they had extended to him in life.

The moon had been full two days ago. While starting to wane, it was still bright enough to turn the tombstones into rows of silvery silhouettes. Approaching Jim and Cecile’s grave site, he heard the low murmur of voices and went on alert. The ponderosa pine guarding their grave site was almost symmetrical, except for its right side tilting closer to the ground and having heavier boughs, as if it had been drawn by an earnest but not very talented eight-year-old.

Rounding the tree, he saw a couple sitting several plots away. The man wore a San Francisco Giants cap, oxford shirt and khakis, the woman a sleeveless dress, but they seemed comfortable in the just-above-freezing temperature. They were in their early thirties and acted as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have a moonlight picnic in a cemetery.

“Don’t be such a hog, Richard,” the woman’s lightly accented voice giggled. “Pass the Chablis,” which he did. She poured a glass  and passed it back to him. The two noticed Jim and looked up.

“Ummn, I don’t think you’re supposed to be picnicking in the cemetery,” Jim said.

“That’s alright,” Richard said.

“It’s our anniversary,” the woman added.

“That being the case, could I have some of that Chablis?” Jim asked. Richard started to pass it, but just as Jim was about to grasp the bottle, the woman spoke up.

“No, Richard,” she said. “You don’t want to corrupt a minor.”

“Laoura is the soul of propriety,” Richard said, withdrawing the bottle. “They taught her well back in Armenia.”

So that’s where the accent was from.

“It’s nice to meet you, Richard and Laura.”

“Not ‘Laura,'” Richard said. “‘La-ou-ra.’ It takes three syllables to say it, the way the British say Jag-u-ar.”

“Oh, Richard,” she said, her smile warm in the cool moonlight. “If he wants to say Laura, that’s fine. Have a seat, young man” she said, patting the blanket they were sitting on next to her.

Although Sierra Groves was a small town, Jim hadn’t seen them around. Richard said that was because he used to work as a ranger for the National Forest Service, so he was out in the woods a lot. Laura had managed an insurance agency in the next town over. Jim asked what they did now, and they quickly exchanged glances.

“Now,” Richard said, “we’re having a picnic.”

They lapsed into silence. Jim shuddered against the chill.

“Aren’t you guys cold?” he asked.

“It’s almost spring,” Laoura said.

“We’re fine,” Richard added.

Silence descended again, which Jim broke by asking how they met.

“I was in town visiting my married sister,” Laoura said. “We were out to dinner at the Highwayman.”

It was the best restaurant in town, especially the steaks. Jim’s parents took him there sometimes.

“I was there by myself and saw the most beautiful girl in the world at the next table,” Richard said. “Not just pretty, but — elegant. Sophisticated. With an old-world formality, but still casual and easygoing. I’m usually not that bold, but I got up, walked over and introduced myself.”

“My sister’s husband doesn’t like non-Armenians, but invited him to join us,” Laoura said. “And one thing led to another.”

She looked a little drowsy and started to nod off.

“You’re sleepy,” Jim said. “Maybe you should go home.” But Richard kept talking as if he hadn’t said anything.

“We lived here for ten years,” he continued. “Sierra Groves being what it is, it was a quiet life. We loved the unhurried pace.”

“Unhurried,” Jim said. “That’s an understatement.”

“We went hiking in the High Sierra, hung out with friends and visited her family back in Armenia once a year.”

“It sounds great,” Jim said. “My girlfriend just broke up with me and I don’t have anyone.”

“That’s bad,” Laoura said.

“But it could be worse,” Richard added. “Look at us.”

“What do you mean?” Jim asked. “Your life is perfect.”

“It was,” Laoura said.

“Until ten years ago,” Richard added.

“That’s when he started getting the headaches,” she said.

“They weren’t so bad at first,” he added. “So I didn’t make anything of them.”

“But they kept getting worse.”

“They did,” he said.

“But you wouldn’t go to the doctor.”

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal.”

“But it was.”

“It was at that. The CAT scan showed brain cancer. They operated.”

Richard removed his Giants cap to reveal an angry red suture track across the top of his shaven  head.

“The operation didn’t get all the cancer. It couldn’t. It had spread too far.”

“I had to quit my job at the insurance agency to look after you.”     

“He’s still here, so you did a good job,” Jim said.

“For a while,” she replied. “But I couldn’t sleep. I started taking sleeping pills. One night — what night was it, Richard?”

“March 15.”

“The Ides of March,”  Jim said.

“Beware the Ides of March,” Richard added, and began to sing “I’m the friendly stranger in the black sedan…” .

“What’s that?” Laoura asked.

“‘Vehicle,'” Richard said. “From the ’60’s. The band was called The Ides of March.”

“He’s the only member of Generation X so wise about old American rock music,” Laura said. “He knows everything about it.”

“Not everything,” Richard said, although Jim could tell he was proud of the compliment.

“Of course it was March 15. I guess I took too many.”

“I woke up in the middle of the night and found her just lying there. The shock was too much for my weakened brain.”

“So you’re both…”

Jim paused, unable to say it.

“Dead,” they said in unison. They smiled wistfully and, as if pixilated, started disappearing, along with the blanket they were sitting on and the bottle of wine Richard held.

Jim found himself alone in the silence and darkness.  Had he fallen asleep? Where the blanket had been were two small headstones:

                      RICHARD THOMSON                                   LAOURA GAZARIAN THOMSON

             August 1, 1977 — March 15, 2014                February 11, 1982 — March 15, 2014

                       Sentinel of the Woods                                      The Light of Yerevan

As he sat there looking, Jim’s smartphone rang.

“Jim, where are you?” his mother said worriedly. “It’s a school day tomorrow!”

Not wanting her to think his disappointment over Eileen Robertson had made him terminally depressed, he chose not to say “the cemetery.” Or anything.

His mother looked at the digital clock on the kitchen counter where she’d gone for a midnight snack. “Today,” she corrected herself. “It’s a school day today. Come home, come home, wherever you are.” And she hung up. He was usually a sensible kid, but he’d been a little out of sorts lately over that Robertson girl.

Jim went over to Grandpa Jim and Grandma Cecile’s graves and tidied them up a bit. Maybe losing Eileen Robertson wasn’t such a big deal at that. He headed toward the cemetery gate, looking back several times to see if Richard and Laura were still there, but they weren’t.

– Jon Krampner