What she did then was the thing the moment was designed, by its smallness, to prevent. She told the Salter daughter nothing about schedules. She completed the arrangements exactly as the contract specified, item by item, the casket by its model and the flowers at their allowance, and she carried the nineteen hundred dollars, in the system, as an uncollected internal variance, coded to a category the regional office had created for discrepancies, where it sat in the home's accounts like an unexploded shell. And that evening, after the visitation, she wrote the first of her two letters to the home office in Atlanta. It was a short letter. It identified the contract by its number and its date and its guarantee. It identified the amended schedule by the name the system gave it and asked by what authority it had been applied to a contract that predated it by twenty years and guaranteed its price against amendment. It asked whether the schedule had been filed with the Georgia insurance department, as an amendment to guaranteed contracts would have to be. It asked for a written answer. She sent it by the company's internal mail and by her own postage both, and she kept a copy in the Salter folder, behind the contract, which is where, two years later, the examiners would find it, in date order, and would photograph it where it lay before they asked her a single question.
The reply came in six weeks, from the office of the general counsel, and it was a masterpiece of the form her grandmother would have called answering the envelope instead of the letter. It thanked her for her vigilance. It affirmed the company's commitment to honoring its obligations. It explained that fulfillment costing was a dynamic process, that schedule harmonization was an industry practice, that the specific variance in the Salter matter had been resolved internally to the family's satisfaction — which was true in the sense that the family had never been asked for the money, and false in every sense that mattered about why — and it did not answer, in any sentence, the question about the Georgia filing. Denise read it twice and put it in the folder behind her own letter, and noted on the folder's label, in pencil, the date of the reply and the word unanswered, and she went on with the funerals of Houston County, and the variance sat in the accounts, and no one from Atlanta ever asked her about it again, which she also noted, in the same pencil, in due course: no follow-up.
The second family was the Mimses, that winter, and this time the amount was smaller — eleven hundred and forty dollars — and the circumstances were worse, because the Mims contract was not an old one. It had been written in 2011, after the acquisition, at the Fairhaven-era desk, on a Fairhaven-era form, but the form, she discovered when she pulled it, still carried the family's sentence — the guarantee sentence, retained in the portfolio's Georgia contracts, her father's lawyer's clause having made the retention a condition of the sale for contracts the home continued to write under the Booker name in the transition years — and the amended schedule was applied to it in the system exactly as it had been applied to the Salters', twenty years its senior, as if the sentence were a decoration the system had been instructed to step over. This time the family was told. Not by Denise. The system's arrangement summary, printed by an assistant for the family's signature, carried the balance as an amount due, and the widower, a man of eighty-one who had buried his wife of fifty-eight years that morning in his mind a dozen times already and had come to the desk believing the believing was the last hard part, read the figure and asked, in a voice that Denise would remember when many podium speeches were forgotten, whether he had misunderstood his wife's contract, or whether the contract had misunderstood him.