She resolved it at the desk, in the hour, by the only means available to her, which was to void the summary, re-enter the fulfillment as a full-guarantee contract, absorb the variance into the same internal category, and tell the widower, truthfully, that his wife's contract was in order and paid in full and that nothing further was owed, and that the paper he had seen was an error of the home's systems, for which she apologized as the home's director. Then she wrote the second letter. It was longer than the first. It cited the first by date. It cited the unanswered question in it, and asked it again, and added a second: whether the home office was aware that the amended schedule, as coded, applied to contracts irrespective of their guarantee language, and whether the company intended to instruct its directors in Georgia to collect sums that guaranteed contracts forbade them to collect. She sent it the same two ways. She kept the same kind of copy. The reply, when it came, came faster and from a different office, and it consisted, in substance, of an instruction: that questions of contract interpretation were to be referred to the regional office by telephone, that written correspondence on interpretive matters created confusion in the files, and that she was commended for her dedication to the families of Perry. She read it standing at the desk, with the Mims folder open, and she understood, with the clarity that sometimes arrives in a life as a simple change in the light, that the letters were not being answered because the letters were the problem — not their content, their existence — and that she had been instructed, in the language of commendation, to stop creating the only kind of evidence that could ever prove what was happening at her desk.
She did not stop. She changed methods, in the manner of her family, which had always adapted its record-keeping to the weather. She stopped writing to Atlanta. She began, instead, keeping the desk file: every fulfillment variance the system produced, by contract number, with the contract's guarantee language noted and the family's disposition recorded — asked, or not asked, at her direction or another's — in a ledger she kept in the drawer beneath the contracts themselves, which she did not discuss with the regional office, and which grew, over the following year, from two entries to nine, in Perry alone. She was not building a case. She would have said, if asked, that she was keeping the home's books the way her grandfather had taught the family to keep them, because a funeral home was the sum of the promises it had outstanding, and a promise that has been quietly reduced is still outstanding, at its original figure, in the only ledger that matters, which is the one the family at the desk believes you are keeping.
The examination team that came to Perry numbered three, and they came on a Tuesday in November, in a state car, with a letter of authority from the department and a list of records requested that ran to four pages and had clearly been written by someone who already knew which drawer to ask about. The lead examiner was a woman in her forties with the settled manner of an auditor who has been lied to by professionals and has made her peace with it as a condition of the work. She presented the letter to Denise at the arrangement desk. She did not ask for the contracts first. She asked, in the order of her list, for the home's fulfillment variance records, for its correspondence with the home office regarding contract interpretation, and for the amended fulfillment schedule as applied at that location, with its revision history.
Denise opened the drawer. She took out the Salter folder and the Mims folder and laid them on the desk, and then the ledger from beneath the contracts, and she watched the lead examiner's face as the folders were opened — watched her read the guarantee sentence, and the letter, and the reply, and the second letter, and the commendation that was an instruction, and the pencil note that said unanswered, and then the ledger, with its nine entries in Perry, in Denise's hand, each one footed to a contract and a family — and the examiner read for a long time without speaking, and then she did a thing that Denise had not expected and would remember with gratitude in the years when gratitude toward officials was not the county's common currency. She said: "You kept the replies." Not as praise. As an inventory. As a woman confirming that a load-bearing member of the structure was where the drawings said it would have to be, if the structure was going to stand at all.
"We keep the drawer," Denise said.