The trust's final certification arrived in the same season, and it arrived, like everything else in the affair's long paper trail, without ceremony, in an envelope from the successor trustee, addressed to every contract holder in the Georgia book and, in a separate mailing required by the order, to the department and the homes. The quarterly statements had climbed the schedule the order set — ninety-three, ninety-six, ninety-eight, in the trustee's computation, a figure the state now received with the attention previously reserved for its opposite — and the statement for the fourth quarter of the order's second year reported the Georgia pre-need trust funded at one hundred point zero percent of current fulfillment liability, computed contract by contract, certified by the trustee, and stamped, in the successor trustee's practice, with the trustee's seal and the computation date in a box at the foot of the first page. It was, in form, an unremarkable document. It resembled, in every particular of its typography, the statements that had preceded it, which had resembled, in every particular, the ones the old trustee had issued for eleven quarters at ninety-eight percent — except that this one's number had been assembled, by people whose duty ran to the beneficiaries, out of records any examiner could re-perform, and had arrived in the mail of sixty thousand Georgia families as a plain statement of a kept schedule. The department closed the replenishment phase of the consent order by a letter of three sentences. The escrow agent rendered its final accounting: the founder's shares were gone, sold into the schedule to the last tranche, and the account stood empty, and the empty account, in its way, was also a document in the file, the record of a price paid in full by the person the arithmetic had named.
Among the contracts standing in the Georgia book at one hundred point zero percent was one of the oldest the Booker drawer held, and it is time, in the order of this story, to say whose it was.
Verna Lott had signed her pre-need contract at the Booker desk in the spring of 2003, at the age of seventy, in the company of her sister, on a morning she had chosen because the dogwoods were out and she intended, she told Denise — who had written the contract, in her own hand, at the desk, in the years when Denise still wrote contracts in her own hand — to conduct the transaction as an outing rather than an errand. She had been a bookkeeper for the county school system for forty-one years. She had buried a husband in 1996, out of that same white house, in a service whose every particular her husband had left to her judgment, and the experience of exercising that judgment in grief had instructed her, as it instructs many, in the value of exercising it in advance. She selected her arrangements with a bookkeeper's thoroughness: the casket by its model and its finish, the vault, the visitation, the music — two hymns, named, with the verses specified, because she had opinions about verses — the flowers at a stated allowance, the grave in the family plot beside her husband, opened and closed. The price was computed and written. The guarantee sentence stood in the contract in its family's wording, the sentence her bookkeeper's eye went to first, as she told Denise at the signing, because she had spent her working life in the company of figures and she knew that figures are only as good as the sentence that governs them: the price of the arrangements selected is guaranteed, and no further sum shall be asked of the family at the time of need. She paid the contract in full over twenty-six months, in installments she brought to the desk in person, in envelopes, because she liked to see the entries made, and Denise made them, in the passbook style the home still kept for its older holders, the balance declining in her hand to the final entry, which Verna read aloud in the office, with satisfaction, in 2005: paid in full.