The Check With Three Names On It

And on Saturday we buried her from St. Mark’s Lutheran, the church where she was baptized and confirmed and married, and afterward 140 people went down the basement stairs and ate ham and cheesy potatoes and three kinds of bars, and I do not remember tasting any of it.

Now here was the bill.

I called Jeff. It was the middle of corn harvest and he hauls grain for the co-op, which means that in October I am married to a voice on a phone. I could hear the truck idling in line at the elevator.

I read him the text.

He was quiet a second. “Six hundred for the hall?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Huh,” Jeff said. That is a whole paragraph, coming from him. “Don’t pay it till I look at it. I’ll be in around ten.”

“He wants it by Friday.”

“Friday’s three days off, Renee. Just let me look.”

I said I would.

Here is why I paid it, since people have asked me, and since I have asked myself.

I had never planned a funeral in my life. I knew what my cousin’s wedding reception had cost at the Legion hall, and $2,250 for 140 plates sounded about like that. I knew halls cost money. I did not know what a church charged because I had never once had cause to ask. And the figures came from my own brother. It never crossed my mind that a brother would invent a line on his mother’s funeral bill.

And I was tired in a way I do not know how to describe to anyone who has not done it. Two years of listening for a person’s breathing through a wall will hollow you out. The thought of calling my own brother and asking him for receipts, four days after we had stood at that grave together, felt like one more heavy thing to lift, and I did not have it in me.

So I got my checkbook out of my purse and I wrote Doug a check for $1,200.

That was our furnace money. Jeff and I had been putting it by since spring, because the furnace in our house is older than our marriage and the man who services it had told us, kindly, to stop naming it.

I walked the envelope to the blue box on the corner before I could think better of it.

When Jeff came in at ten that night, smelling like corn dust and diesel, I told him.

He took his cap off and looked at it. He did not say I told you. He has never said that to me in nineteen years.

“Well,” he said. “Then it’s paid.”

“It’s paid.”

The next Tuesday I found out.

I had a thank-you card for the funeral dinner women. It was a good one, with a watercolor wheat field on the front, and I had written three paragraphs inside it and sealed it in its white envelope. I could have mailed it. But Mom would have carried it down there herself, so that is what I did.

Tuesday mornings the women are in the church basement. They have been as long as I can remember. They wash and sort whatever dishes came in with the last funeral, and they take stock of the freezer, and they drink coffee that would hold a spoon upright.

It was a bright morning, and the sun was coming in through the high windows along the alley. The whole room smelled like dish soap and old coffee and a little like ham, which it always does.