Every Line of the Funeral Bill
“Grief does that, Yvonne,” Les said. “It makes people forget what they picked.”
He said it kindly. That was the worst of it. He said it the way he had said a thousand soft things in that office over the years, with his hands folded on the blotter and his head tipped a little to the left.
My sister sat beside me with her purse in her lap and both hands on the clasp. She is 69 years old. She taught Sunday school for forty of them. She looked at the invoice, then at Les, and I watched her begin to wonder whether she was losing her mind.
“I remember the gray one,” she said. “With the pale blue inside.”
“That was the first one you looked at,” Les said. “Then you chose the Monarch. It’s all right here.”
He tapped the paper with one finger. The paper said $18,045.
I had been in that room twice before, once for Mother and once for Dad. Same oak desk, same tissue box set where a hand would land on it, same framed sign over the filing cabinet: Stroud & Son Funeral Home, Serving Our Families Since 1961.
“Les,” I said. “I’m going to ask you for something, and I’d like you to hear it as a favor.”
“Anything, Jean.”
“Open your general price list to the first page. The one you’re required to hand every family. Then read me this invoice one line at a time, and tell me where each number comes from.”
He smiled. It was a small smile, and it stayed on his mouth a second too long.
“Now, Jean. Yvonne doesn’t need to go through all that. She’s been through enough.”
“She has,” I said. “That’s why I’d like to do it now, with the book open, while she can still ask you questions. Not in a month, with a collector.”
My husband Alton waited out in the truck with the window down and a Farm Journal on the dash. “Do it your way, Jean,” he had told me the night before. “I’ll drive and I’ll wait.”
Les looked at me a long moment. Then he took a blue folder from the second drawer, and something crossed his face I did not understand yet. It was not anger. It looked like a man hearing a noise in the basement.
He set it open on the desk between us.
I did not walk in that morning on a hunch. There was a folded paper in my purse, under my billfold, and I had not decided yet when to use it.
My brother-in-law Les Stroud is married to my youngest sister, Patty. There are three of us Rutledge girls, raised outside Frankfort, Kansas, on a quarter section of wheat and milo. Yvonne is the oldest at 69, I am the middle one at 66, and Patty is the baby at 62.