The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

She was still treating me like the one who pays, the one who picks up after her son.

But somewhere around Merrill, with the sand truck ahead of me and the sky the color of dishwater, a second thought came in under the first one, and I couldn’t shake it.

Ilene had been a lot of things. Careless was never one of them. She knew perfectly well that I never signed anything. She knew Stan would tell me so. So why write my name at all?

The funeral home sits on a corner a few blocks from downtown Rhinelander, a white two-story building with a chapel on the side and a long porch somebody had shoveled clean that morning.

I parked by the snowbank and sat for a minute with the engine running.

Then I went in.

The office was quiet and warm. It smelled like coffee and furniture polish, and the wood paneling was the same honey oak I remembered from Walt’s visitation years ago.

Snow lay thick on the spruces outside the window, the kind that make a town look like a Christmas card even in February.

Stan Mattson came out from the back and met me at the end of the counter.

He was a tall, gray-haired man of 63 with a short gray beard, in a dark suit, and he had a manila folder waiting on the counter.

“Mrs. Kruse,” he said, and shook my hand across the counter. “I’m sorry for your loss. I know it’s complicated, but I’m sorry all the same. Ilene was a good friend to this town.”

“Thank you, Stan. And please, it’s Janet. I don’t think anybody has called me Mrs. Kruse since the kids were in grade school.”

He smiled a little. “Ilene called you that. Every time she mentioned you. My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Kruse. She said it like she was introducing a judge.”

That stopped me. I hadn’t expected it, and I didn’t know where to put it.

On a stand near the counter stood the roses. It was a full casket spray, deep red roses packed tight together with green worked through them, the kind of arrangement you see laid along the top of a casket at the front of a chapel.

I walked over and stood in front of them. They were beautiful. They were exactly what Ilene would have picked. Nothing fussy, no carnations, nothing dyed blue. Just red roses, and plenty of them.

“She was very specific about those,” Stan said. “Red roses only. A full spray. From the grandchildren. She said the grandchildren’s flowers go on the casket, and everybody else’s go on the stands.”

“Can I see the sheet?” I asked.

Stan opened the folder and turned it around so I could read it. There it was, two pages of the funeral home’s planning form, every box filled in with blue ink in her slanted hand.

Casket: oak, plain. Hymns: “Abide With Me” and “Beautiful Savior.” Lunch: ham on buns, scalloped potatoes, coleslaw, bars from the circle ladies at church. Flowers: casket spray, red roses, from the grandchildren, Erin, Mark and Jodi.

And at the bottom of the second page, under responsible party: Janet Kruse, daughter-in-law.

I read that line for a long time.

“Did she say anything?” I asked. “When she wrote this. Did she say why?”

Stan rubbed his short gray beard. He seemed to be choosing his words.