The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

He turned it over and laid it on the counter. My name was written across the front in her careful school cook handwriting. Janet. And under my name, three more words: After the service.

“She gave me that the same day she did the plan,” Stan said. “She told me you’d be the one standing here. She was very sure of it.”

“She couldn’t have known that,” I said.

“She said you’d come about the roses,” Stan said. “She said Lowell would forget them and the kids would be short and you’d drive up here in whatever weather God sent. And she said I was to hold this until after the service, and not one minute before.”

Then he set his hand flat on top of the envelope and slid my check out from under my fingers with the other one.

“I’ll keep it right here in her file,” he said. “I promised her.”

I stood there in my coat looking at my own name in a dead woman’s handwriting. Outside, a plow went by on the street and threw a wave of snow up over the curb.

“All right,” I said. “After the service.”

I left a few minutes before four. As I was pulling out of the lot onto the street, a gray Chevy pickup with a dented tailgate came the other way and turned in. I knew the truck. I knew the man driving it.

Lowell saw me. For a second I thought he would stop. Instead he lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, the way men up north do on a county road, and I lifted two fingers back. That was all. I drove home in the dark.

Erin called me Wednesday night on her way home from the hospital. I could hear the blinker clicking in her car.

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I never called the florist,” she said. “I didn’t get one break. I’ll call first thing in the morning. Mark says he can put in fifty and Jodi can do thirty after Friday.”

“Honey, don’t worry about the flowers,” I said. “Your grandma had all of that planned. Stan at the funeral home says it’s taken care of.”

“Taken care of how?”

“She planned everything, Erin. Two years ago. Hymns, lunch, flowers, all of it. You know your grandmother.”

Erin laughed a little, tired. “That is so Grandma,” she said. “Okay. Okay. Thank you for finding out. I’ll tell the other two. Are you coming Saturday?”

“Of course I’m coming.”

“Will you sit with us?”

I hadn’t thought about where I would sit. An ex-wife at a funeral is a strange thing. You’re not family anymore, and you’re not quite anything else.

“I’ll sit in the back,” I said. “Your dad’s family should be up front. You three sit with your dad.”

Erin didn’t argue. She was too tired to argue. “I love you, Mom,” she said, and the blinker stopped clicking, and she hung up.

Visitation was Friday evening from four to seven, and the service was Saturday at eleven in the chapel at Mattson’s.

Ilene’s church would host the lunch afterward in the basement fellowship hall, ham on buns and scalloped potatoes, exactly as the sheet said.

The burial would wait until spring. In that part of Wisconsin, you don’t open a grave in February unless you have to.

Ilene would stay in the receiving vault at the cemetery until the ground thawed in April, and then they’d lay her next to Walt.