The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

“She knew, didn’t she?” Lowell said. “She knew you’d drive up. She knew you wouldn’t pay it. And she knew you’d hand it right back to me.”

“I think she did,” I said.

“She always said you were the one who held us together,” Lowell said. “When we were married I thought she just liked you better than me. I think maybe she was telling me something, and I didn’t hear it.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I reached out and put my gloved hand on his arm for just a second, the way you would with any man standing in a parking lot on the day he buried his mother.

“You’re paying now,” I said. “That counts, Lowell. That counts for a lot.”

He nodded. His eyes were wet, but that could have been the wind. “Drive safe,” he said. “It’s supposed to blow later.”

He walked back toward his gray Chevy, where Mark was waiting for him by the passenger door.

Halfway across the lot he stopped and looked back at me, and he lifted two fingers, the way he had on Tuesday. I lifted two fingers back.

I had my car door open when I heard my name again.

Stan Mattson was coming down the side steps of the chapel in his dark suit, holding the manila folder against his chest to keep the wind off it.

“Janet,” he said, a little out of breath. “It’s after the service.”

He took the plain envelope out of the folder and handed it to me. My name, and under it, After the service.

“I’ve done this for thirty-eight years,” Stan said. “People leave letters sometimes. Not often. I’ve never had anybody so sure about who would come for theirs.”

“Thank you, Stan,” I said. “For everything. For telling me straight on the phone.”

“She’d have had my hide if I didn’t,” he said, and he smiled and went back inside.

I sat down in the driver’s seat and shut the door and started the car to get the heater going.

The windows were fogged. The parking lot had mostly emptied out. I could see the taillights of the hearse turning out onto the street.

I opened the envelope. Inside there was one sheet of lined paper, folded in thirds, written on both sides in blue ink. It was dated two years earlier, in October.

“Dear Janet,” it began. “Stan will have told you by now that you don’t owe one red cent for my funeral. He is right. I knew it when I wrote your name, and I wrote it anyway.”

“I never believed in divorce, and I never will. You married my son in front of God and our whole church, and as far as I am concerned you are still my daughter-in-law. I don’t care what the courthouse in Medford says.”

“When Walt’s mother died, I paid for her funeral. Walt was out on the pipeline, and his brothers were no help. Nobody asked me to do it. I did it because the daughter-in-law is the one who holds a family together, and somebody has to.”

“I wrote your name down because I knew you would come. I knew Lowell would forget the roses and the kids would be short on money and you would get in your car anyway. If you are reading this, then I was right about you, and I usually am.”