Every Line of the Funeral Bill
“I’ll do it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone else what’s in them.”
“I know you won’t.”
It took us eleven days, in the back room with the long table where Les’s father used to lay out casket catalogs. Travis brought the file boxes up from the basement, I took the invoices one at a time with a legal pad on my knee, and Patty brought sandwiches. Les sat in the corner on a folding chair, and every so often I would read out a number and he would nod.
A hundred and twelve funerals in three years. Seven overcharged, besides Yvonne.
Not all were as bad as hers: a $400 line for visitation days that never happened, a $1,100 gap on a vault, a bronze finish billed on a steel casket, a widow in Vermillion named Ardis billed $3,100 over. The seven totaled $9,420.
None of the seven had complained. Each had told someone it was more than they’d expected, but it was a funeral, and they had not wanted to think about it.
Those are the ones who frighten me still. How many quiet ones, in how many towns, have been told that grief made them forget?
Les paid, and I want to tell you how, because it is the part of the story that settled it for me.
He and Patty had a lot on the north shore of Tuttle Creek Lake, a quarter acre with four poplars he had planted himself. They had bought it in 1999 to build a little cabin on when Les retired. Les called it “the Someday.”
He sold it that month for $36,000.
He paid off the casket company, $23,400. He wrote seven checks totaling $9,420 and handed each one over himself at a kitchen table, with Travis beside him. He wrote Yvonne a check for $1,955, the amount Art’s policy had overpaid, tore up the $6,045 balance, and signed a new invoice for $10,045 that matched his list line for line. His hand shook so hard the signature skidded.
After the casket company, the seven families and Yvonne, $1,225 was left. He put it toward the first month’s note at the bank.
He did not stand up in front of anyone, and nobody asked him to. But a check handed over at a kitchen table does not stay in the kitchen in a town of that size.
I would love to tell you everything came out clean. It did not. Eleven families chose not to come back. Some went to Heartland Family Care out on the highway. One woman at the quilting circle told me a man who would do that to Yvonne Goodwin had no business near a dead body of hers, and I told her I understood.
Travis took the arrangement conferences. Les kept the hearse, the cemetery, and the standing in doorways. A second signature went on every statement, and Travis hung a card on the wall: Ask to see the price list before you decide anything.