She lived nineteen more years in the house on the Perry road where she had lived since her marriage, keeping her own books, driving until she was eighty-eight, attending the funerals of her contemporaries at the white house with the regularity of a woman auditing a promise's long performance, and saying, on the occasions when the home's troubles were the county's conversation — the collapse, the examination, the years of the statements climbing in her mailbox, which she filed, being Verna Lott, in date order, in a folder of her own — saying, to her niece, the sentence that the county would repeat when her own turn came: "They have my money and my instructions both. I intend to collect on the instructions." She had read every quarterly statement the successor trustee sent her. She had checked her contract's position against its folder twice a year, on a schedule she kept in the front of the folder, in pencil, in a bookkeeper's hand, the dates and the ratios in two columns, the last entry made in the autumn of her ninety-first year, when the ratio stood at ninety-eight and the column balanced, as she noted beneath it, to the cent.
She died in her sleep in the second week of the new year, at ninety-one, in the house on the Perry road, with the dogwoods not yet out and her affairs in the order she had spent a lifetime imposing on them. Her niece found, on the kitchen table, laid out the night before with the forethought that her family would come to understand was simply the final entry in a lifelong ledger, the folder: the contract of 2003, the paid-in-full statement of 2005, the trustee's statements in their order, and the last quarterly certification, with the trustee's seal stamped in its box, and a note in her hand on the folder's cover, in pencil, undated, which the family read standing in the kitchen and which no one in the family ever afterward quoted exactly, out of a feeling that it belonged to the file rather than to conversation. It said that the arrangements were complete, that the money was where the statements said it was, and that the home on Main Street would know what to do. Her niece carried the folder to the white house that morning, in both hands, the way one carries the documents of a person who has finished with documents, and laid it on the arrangement desk in front of Denise Booker, in the office where the contract had been written twenty-two years before, three years before the acquisition, in a hand that had since acquired a tremor's opposite — Denise's hand was as steady as her grandfather's — and where the drawer stood behind the desk with two hundred other folders, every one of them a promise, every one of them now standing in a book certified, to the cent, at one hundred point zero percent.
The arrangements took three days, which was Verna Lott's own doing, twenty-two years after the fact, because she had specified a funeral that required no decisions and therefore left her family with nothing to do but verify, and verification, in the new dispensation of the Booker Funeral Home, was a discipline with its own liturgy. Denise received the niece at the desk that first morning and did what she had resolved, in the years of the drawer, that she would do on the day a contract like this one came fully due: she treated the file as an examiner would, from the first page, in sequence, in the family's presence, because the family's presence at the reading of its own paper was, she had come to believe, the entire difference between a funeral home and a billing office.
She took the original contract from the drawer — not the system's record, not the trustee's digitization, but the folder's own paper, the contract of 2003, with Verna's signature and her own hand in the entries and the guarantee sentence standing in its wording — and she laid it beside the folder the niece had brought from the kitchen table, the contract's twin, and the two copies agreed, as they had agreed for twenty-two years, in every word and figure. Then she laid beside them the successor trustee's current statement for the contract, which the trustee's office produced that morning on the home's request, as the order's procedures provided: the contract's arrangements priced at current fulfillment cost, item by item — the casket by its model, at the price the model now commanded; the vault; the visitation; the music; the flowers at their allowance; the grave, in the family plot, opened and closed — and against the items, the trust assets standing to the contract's account under the book's certification, and the trustee's conclusion, stamped with the seal and the date, in the box at the foot of the page: paid in full; no balance due; no further sum to be asked of the family, in the statute's language, which happened also to be the guarantee sentence's language, the two documents rhyming across twenty-two years like the two sides of a fraction finally allowed to be read in the same room.