The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

“I told her the same thing I told you on the phone,” he said. “I said, Ilene, a name on this line doesn’t bind anybody who doesn’t sign. I said, if you want Janet to pay, Janet has to agree to it. And she looked at me like I’d told her water runs uphill.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, the daughter-in-law pays for the funeral, Stan. That’s how it was done. I paid for Walt’s mother, and Janet will pay for me.”

I knew the story. Everybody in the family knew it. When Walt’s mother died in 1981, Walt was working on a pipeline crew out in North Dakota, and his two brothers didn’t have two nickels between them.

Ilene paid for the whole funeral out of her cafeteria checks, a little at a time, for most of a year.

She told that story at every Thanksgiving. I always thought she told it to make herself look good.

Standing there in the funeral home, I began to wonder whether she told it because it was the only way she knew to explain what family meant to her.

“She also said one other thing,” Stan said. “She said, my son has never paid for anything in his life, and that is my own fault. I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything.”

I looked out the window at the snow for a minute.

“Stan,” I said finally. “I’m going to pay for the roses.”

He nodded slowly, like a man who had expected exactly that.

“Just the roses,” I said. “Not one thing else. The casket, the lunch, the vault, the chapel, all of the rest of it goes to her son. Lowell is a grown man. It’s his mother.”

I didn’t say it mean. I didn’t need to.

“I already told him that’s how it would likely go,” Stan said quietly. “He’s coming in at four. We’ll work something out. I’ve been doing this a long time, Janet. Men like Lowell usually step up when there’s nobody left standing in front of them.”

“How much for the spray?”

“Three hundred eighty-five dollars,” Stan said. “That’s what the florist charged me, and that’s what I’ll charge you. I don’t put anything on top of family flowers.”

I kept my black wool coat on. I didn’t plan to stay long.

I opened my purse and got out my checkbook, the plain blue kind from the credit union in Medford, and set it on the counter.

I wrote the check slowly, because my hand was not as steady as I wanted it to be. Mattson Funeral Home.

Three hundred eighty-five and no cents. And in the memo line, I wrote: Roses from Erin, Mark and Jodi.

“Do you want your name on the card?” Stan asked. He had a small white florist card and an envelope ready on the counter. “Some people put ‘and Mom’ at the bottom.”

“No,” I said. “It’s from the grandchildren. That’s what she wanted, and that’s what it is.”

I picked up his pen and wrote the card myself, in my own hand, the same way Ilene had written it on the sheet. “To Grandma Ilene, with all our love. Erin, Mark and Jodi.”

Stan tucked the card into the roses, right in the center where it would sit at the head of the casket. I didn’t put my name anywhere near those flowers.

When I tore the check out and held it across the counter, Stan didn’t take it right away.

He reached back into Ilene’s folder instead. Behind the planning sheets there was a sealed envelope, a plain one, the kind that comes fifty to a box at the drugstore.