In the ordinary course of the Fairhaven years there had been much that was merely ordinary: new carpet, specified from Atlanta; a visitation software system, mandated from Atlanta; the chapel's organ repaired after a delay that Denise had ended by paying the organ man partly herself and being reimbursed in a later quarter without comment. The funerals themselves had proceeded as funerals proceed, and the pre-need contracts, when deaths occurred, had been honored — honored, she would specify later, when she was asked to specify, and she chose the word with a director's precision, in the homes' first years under the new ownership, without incident that reached her desk. The incidents, when they came, came the way such things come to people in her position: not as a policy, which would have arrived as a document she could have refused, but as a practice, which arrived as a series of individual cases, each with its own explanation, each small enough to be an error, until the day she laid them side by side on the desk and they stopped being errors and became a schedule.
The first case reached her desk in the spring of the year before the collapse. The second reached it that winter. By the autumn of the signing meeting in Atlanta — a meeting Denise Booker knew nothing about, in a boardroom she had never seen, at the far end of whose table a woman she had never met was about to ask three questions about a funding ratio — Denise had already done, in Perry, the thing her grandfather had taught the family to do with any promise in doubt. She had written it down, she had written to the home office about it, and she had kept the replies.
The first family was the Salters. Eunice Salter had signed her pre-need contract at the Booker desk in 2003, at the age of seventy-four, in the company of her daughter, and had paid it in full over three years of installments, and had kept the paid-in-full statement in the same envelope as her will, which was where her daughter found it, twenty years later, on the night Eunice died in the hospital in Warner Robins at the age of ninety-four. The contract was the family's standard instrument, with the family's standard sentence in it: the price guaranteed, no further sum to be asked. The arrangements it specified were specific — the casket by model, the vault, the visitation hours, the flowers at a stated allowance, the grave opened and closed — and Eunice Salter, who had been a schoolteacher and a keeper of lists, had chosen each item with the air of a woman composing a document she did not intend to renegotiate.
Her daughter brought the contract to the arrangement office on the morning after the death, and Denise received her at the desk, and took out the folder, and confirmed, as she had confirmed a hundred times, that everything was in order and paid and guaranteed, and began the arrangements in the confidence of the sentence in the folder. It was not until she entered the service into Fairhaven's system that the system answered her, and the answer came in the form of a balance: the program, which computed every pre-need fulfillment against a schedule it called the amended fulfillment schedule, current revision, reported that the contract's guarantees were capped under the amended schedule at an amount below the contract's own items, and it produced, helpfully, as systems do, the difference as an amount due from the family: nineteen hundred dollars.
Denise had never seen the amended fulfillment schedule. She had never been sent it, never been trained on it, never signed an acknowledgment of it. It existed in the system the way weather exists in a forecast, as a condition imposed from elsewhere, and when she telephoned the regional office to ask what it was, she was told, by a man whose name she wrote down, that the amended schedule was a home-office harmonization of fulfillment costs across the portfolio, that it applied to all pre-need fulfillments in the region, and that the difference it produced was to be collected from the family at arrangement, as a standard adjustment, in the same manner as any at-need balance. She said that the contract guaranteed the price in writing. The man said that the contracts were subject to the company's current schedules, and that the families, in his experience, understood when it was explained to them as a cost adjustment, and that the home office would prefer the explanation to be given in those terms rather than in the terms of a dispute about documents. She wrote that down too.