Every Line of the Funeral Bill

“Aunt Jean,” he said. “I know it’s late.”

I let him in and put the kettle on, because it is what my hands do. He would not sit. He stood by the refrigerator turning the cap.

“Dad says you and Aunt Yvonne are coming in tomorrow to go over the account.”

“We are.”

“It’s the Goodwin bill.”

“It is.”

He nodded at the floor. “I saw the figure on the screen Monday, before it went in the mail. It said Monarch. I told myself it had to be a mistake, that he’d fix it, that I’d misread. I told myself that for three days.”

“Travis, you don’t have to tell me this.”

“Yes, ma’am, I do.” He opened the folder and laid one sheet on my table. “I don’t order the Monarch. We don’t stock it. I place every order we make, and I signed for this one myself.”

It was a delivery slip from the casket supplier in Salina, one page, dated the Thursday before the funeral. One casket, Prairie Rest, gray steel, with a number and a signature in blue pen. T. Stroud.

“It came Thursday on the truck. We paid cash on delivery, because the account’s been on hold since June. It was the only casket we took in all week.” He swallowed. “I dressed Uncle Art. I closed the lid. It was the gray one, with the pale blue inside. I thought Aunt Yvonne would like it, because she’d once told me he had blue eyes.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“She said it at the house, the morning he died, while Dad and I were getting the cot. I never forgot it.”

I turned the slip around so it faced him. “Why aren’t you telling your father this?”

“I tried. I stood in the doorway of his office at noon today. He said, ‘Not now, son.’ He’s been up half of every night with the books, Aunt Jean. We did 61 funerals in 2019 and 38 last year. Heartland Family Care built that new place out on the Marysville highway, and they took twenty-three calls off us last year alone. The casket company put us on cash in June. He thinks next month it comes back.” He stopped. “I’m not saying that to make it all right. It isn’t.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

“I can’t say it in front of Aunt Yvonne. I just can’t. But I can’t let her sit there and be told she’s confused, either.”

I looked at him a long time. His father had needed someone to tell him no for a year and a half, and it had come to this boy at my refrigerator.

“You understand what this does to your father.”