The answer went back to Atlanta within the sixty days, over Denise's signature as the family's representative: the Bookers would exercise the right. The purchase agreement that followed was forty pages, drafted by the restructured company's counsel and reviewed by the Bookers' — the same Perry lawyer's firm that had drafted, a decade earlier, the clause Elias had read aloud across the desk to Wesley Dunmore, the clause that had outlasted the company that signed it — and its terms were the order's terms and the bank's terms and the trustee's terms, all of them documents, all of them read, and among them, at Denise's insistence and with the department's approval, one clause of the family's own, carried over from the old purchase agreement word for word, because some sentences, the family held, are not improved by the passage of empires: every pre-need contract written by the Booker Funeral Home and outstanding at the closing would be honored according to its terms, including its price guarantee, to the letter, without surcharge, amendment, or recharacterization, for the life of the contract. The restructured company's counsel, a young woman from a firm with no history in the file, read the clause and said it was already the law and the order both, and therefore redundant; and the Bookers' lawyer said that the family had some experience of the distance between a law and a schedule, and would like the clause anyway; and the clause went in.
The closing was held at the bank on the square, on a morning in late autumn, in a room with the bank's charter on the wall and coffee in a carafe that had served a thousand closings, and it proceeded through its liturgy of initialed pages without a single speech. Elias signed where his signature was required, with the tremor, slowly, in his father's hand's descendant, a signature that had been forming for seventy-nine years and had one more document in it than anyone had expected. Denise signed after him. The funds moved by wire from the bank to the restructured company's account and from escrow to the order's purposes, in amounts that appeared on screens and were confirmed by telephones, in the manner of modern money, which travels invisibly and arrives as a number, and the white house on Main Street, with its parcel and its license and its book of contracts and its drawer, belonged again to the family that had built it, subject to a mortgage held by strangers, which Elias, signing the last page, pronounced to be the correct and historical condition of the enterprise.
That afternoon, the sign came down. The company's green sign — Fairhaven Memorial, Perry, with the Booker name beneath in the smaller letters — was unbolted from its mountings by a crew the company sent for the purpose, because the sign was the company's property under the agreement, and the Bookers watched from the porte-cochere as it was lowered, with professional slowness, onto the bed of a truck, and driven away toward the interstate, toward a warehouse of such signs. The white house stood in the late light with its sign mountings empty and its facade briefly anonymous, a building between names, and Denise stood looking up at it with her father beside her in his overcoat, and she said: "It looks undressed." And Elias said: "It looks like nineteen thirty-eight. Your grandfather's sign painter charged by the letter. We will want to choose the letters carefully." He considered the facade. "I believe we can afford all of them this time," he said. "Booker. Funeral. Home. It is not a long name, Denise. It only ever felt long because it had to carry so much."
The sign painter came from Macon, recommended by the historical society, a man in his sixties who still worked in enamel and gilt and who treated the commission with the gravity of a portraitist. The Bookers' instruction, arrived at over a Sunday dinner in the apartment with the facade's measurements on the table, was the simplest the painter had received in a decade of corporate rebrandings, during which he had painted, by his count, eleven versions of the word Fairhaven across the state, some of them over names he had painted himself in better years. The new sign was to carry the family name alone, in the letters the house had carried from 1946 to the acquisition: BOOKER FUNERAL HOME, in the deep green-black the family had always used against the white, with no subsidiary line, no member-of language, no smaller letters beneath. "Just the name," Denise told him. "The name is the whole of the information." He quoted by the letter, out of respect for the tradition Elias had described to him on the telephone, and he scaffoldered the facade in the first week of the new year, and worked through the winter light in his own time, laying the letters in with the patience of a man who understood that he was not decorating a building but restoring a sentence to a wall.