The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

“Mrs. Kruse, this is Stan Mattson at Mattson Funeral Home in Rhinelander,” the man on the phone said, and I knew before he said anything else that somebody up north had died.

It was a Tuesday morning in February, and I was at the front desk of the clinic in Medford, where I have checked people in for nineteen years.

A man was waiting on a lab draw, and a mother was bouncing a feverish toddler on her knee.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” Stan said. “Ilene Kruse passed away Sunday night at the nursing home. She went peacefully, they tell me. She was 84.”

I put my hand flat on the counter. Ilene was my ex-husband’s mother.

Lowell and I had been divorced for ten years, and I had not heard her voice since Christmas, when she called to thank me for the fruitcake.

“Thank you for letting me know,” I said. “I’m sorry. Have you talked to Lowell?”

“I have,” Stan said. “He’s handling the obituary. But there’s something else, and I’d rather you hear it from me than from anybody else. Ilene came in two years ago and pre-planned her service. She picked every single thing herself.”

“That sounds like her,” I said, and I meant it. Ilene planned church dinners for three hundred people out of a single spiral notebook. She would not have left a funeral to chance.

“The casket, the visitation, the chapel service, the lunch, the flowers, the vault,” Stan said. “All of it is written down. The total comes to $9,400. She didn’t pay anything toward it. And on the line where it asks who will be responsible for payment, she wrote your name.”

The toddler started crying. The man waiting on his lab draw looked up from his phone. I sat there with the receiver against my shoulder and felt the old heat climb up the back of my neck.

Ten years. Ten years since I signed the papers in the Taylor County courthouse, and that woman still had me written down as the one who pays.

“My name,” I said. “Not Lowell’s.”

“Your name,” Stan said. “Janet Kruse, daughter-in-law. Her words, in her handwriting.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was thinking about every check I had written for that family when I was married into it.

The light bill, the truck insurance, the kids’ school pictures, Lowell’s hunting license the year he forgot.

Then Stan said the part that mattered, and he said it slowly, the way a man does when he has said it before and wants it understood.

“Mrs. Kruse, I need you to know this plainly. You never signed anything with us. A name on a planning sheet doesn’t make anybody responsible. Only the person who signs the contract owes the bill. You don’t owe us a dime.”

I let out a breath I had not known I was holding. I had worked at a clinic long enough to know how billing works.

Nobody can sign your name for you, not even a stubborn old woman in Rhinelander.

“I appreciate you telling me that,” I said.

“I’d have been wrong not to,” Stan said. “I called Lowell first thing. He’s next of kin, and he’s coming in this afternoon at four to go over the arrangements.”

I could have said thank you and hung up. Nobody in the world would have blamed me. I had a job, a mortgage, and a seventeen-year-old furnace of my own to worry about.