The negotiations had taken most of a year, and they had not been, in the end, about price. The price Fairhaven offered was fair, and then, when Elias hesitated, it was improved, and it was not the improvement that decided him. What decided him was the paper. Dunmore himself had come to Perry for the final meeting — this was in the years when he still did such things personally, when the acquisitions were small enough that the founder's hand on a contract was part of what was being purchased — and across the desk, in the presence of Elias's lawyer, Dunmore had given the undertaking that Elias had required as the condition of any sale at all, and had given it in writing, in the purchase agreement, in a clause Elias's lawyer had drafted and Dunmore had signed without amendment: that every pre-need contract written by the Booker Funeral Home and outstanding at the closing would be honored by the purchaser according to its terms, including its price guarantee, to the letter, without surcharge, amendment, or recharacterization, for the life of the contract. Elias had read the clause aloud before he signed. He was a man who believed that documents improved by being heard in the room where they would have to be kept. Then he had signed, and shaken Dunmore's hand across the desk — the hand had been given without hesitation then, warmly, with both of Dunmore's hands, over the drawer of contracts — and the Booker Funeral Home had become, in the language of the acquirer's releases, part of the Fairhaven family of funeral homes, and its sign had come down off the white house on Main Street and been replaced, within the month, by a sign in the company's green that read Fairhaven Memorial — Perry, with the Booker name retained beneath in smaller letters, a courtesy, the regional manager explained, to local sentiment.
His daughter Denise had stayed. She was fifty-one, a licensed funeral director and embalmer who had grown up in the apartment over the chapel and had left Perry exactly once, for the mortuary science program, and come home with her licenses and her father's stoop of attention and no evident desire to be anywhere else. When the sale closed, Fairhaven had offered her the managing directorship of the home — the acquirer always offered the family member the directorship, because continuity was the product it sold to the next town — and she had accepted, for reasons she explained to her father in the kitchen of the apartment she still kept above the chapel: the families were hers, the contracts in the drawer were hers in every sense that mattered short of the legal one, and if the new owners intended to keep the promises, her presence could only help them, and if they did not, her presence would at least ensure that someone in the building knew what the promises had been. Elias had listened to this with his hands around a coffee cup and had said, "Then keep the drawer," and she had understood him to mean not the furniture but the jurisdiction.
She kept it. The original contracts remained in the desk in the arrangement office, in their folders, in her grandfather's and father's and her own handwriting on the labels, because Fairhaven's systems had digitized the portfolio within a year of the acquisition and the paper originals, which the home office regarded as an archiving redundancy, had never been called in, and Denise, who had a professional's respect for redundancy of exactly that kind, had not volunteered them. She knew what was in the drawer the way her father had: by family, by year, by the wording of the guarantee, which in the Booker contracts was a single sentence her grandfather had composed in 1948 and the family had never altered, because it had never needed altering: the price of the arrangements selected is guaranteed, and no further sum shall be asked of the family at the time of need. Some of the contracts were fifty years old in their expectations and still ahead of their funerals. The people who had signed them were, many of them, still alive in Houston County, in their eighties and nineties, paying nothing further, owed nothing further, waiting in the full confidence of a sentence written before Denise was born. She thought of the drawer, on the days when she thought of it at all, the way a lighthouse keeper might think of the lamp: not as a possession, but as a commitment that other people were navigating by, in weather she could not see.