The three days had their other business. The department issued, that week, the closing letter of the consent order's examination phase — the findings discharged, the replenishment certified, the restitution verified at two hundred and fourteen families and closed — and the letter was reported in the state press in six paragraphs, on an inside page, because the restoration of a trust is not news in the way its emptying was news, a fact the lead examiner, signing the letter, remarked upon to her staff without bitterness: the department's product, she said, was the absence of events, and absence does not photograph. In Perry, the sign painter worked his scaffold through the bright cold days, laying in the letters of the family name in their green-black enamel, one letter a day at his pace, with the gilt edge he had specified himself, and the town drove past at the speed of people pretending not to slow down, and Elias, who walked the two blocks from the apartment each morning of that week with his cane and his overcoat, stood across the street on the third morning and watched the painter finish the second O of the name he had been born into the middle of, and said to Denise, who had come down to walk him back: "Your grandfather paid for the letters in 'forty-six out of a good winter. He said a sign was a contract with the street. Anybody could read it, so it had to be true where anybody could check it." He watched the painter's brush. "We had it in smaller letters for a while there, under another man's name. I expect the street noticed. Streets keep the minutes of things nobody writes down."
On the third day, the arrangements were complete in every particular Verna Lott had specified, and the home telephoned the family, and the visitation was set for the evening, and the service for the morning following, in the chapel of the white house, under the name the painter had finished restoring to its wall that afternoon — all the letters in, and the gilt still curing, and the scaffolding struck and carried away, except for the painter's ladder, which he had left leaning against the wall beneath the sign, intending to return for it and for a final inspection of the enamel in the morning light, as painters do, because a sign, like a contract, should be checked once more in the light in which it will actually be read.
The visitation filled the white house in the way that the funerals of bookkeepers and schoolteachers do, which is to say with the accumulated population of a working life: retired teachers who had shared a faculty room with Verna Lott in the seventies, and the children of those teachers, whom she had known as pupils and then as colleagues' grown sons and daughters; the school system's current bookkeeper, a woman of thirty who had never met her and had come because the office kept a photograph of Verna at a desk in 1978 and because her own ledger, on the day of the visitation, balanced for the first time in a month, which she had chosen to take as an instruction; neighbors from the Perry road; the niece and her family; and, in the second hour, in a suit that his daughter had laid out for him, Elias Booker, who had buried Verna's husband out of that chapel in 1996 and had come down the stairs from the apartment on Denise's arm and taken the seat she had kept for him at the side of the room, where the directors' families sit when the funeral is also, in some part that no one mentions, their own.
The service the next morning was the service Verna Lott had composed in 2003 and the contract had carried, unamended, through the acquisition, the schedule, the examination, and the restoration, like a message in a bottle thrown from a desk. The casket was the casket by its model, in its finish. The flowers stood at their allowance, which was not a large allowance and was, in consequence, arranged by the florist with the particular exactness that small allowances impose and large ones forgive. The two hymns were sung with the verses she had specified — all of them, including the third verse that congregations ordinarily skip, which the minister announced, with a dry clarity that Verna would have appreciated, as the deceased's instruction and therefore not negotiable. The minister, who was young and had prepared remarks about a life of quiet service, delivered them well and briefly, and then did the thing the family remembered longest: he read, in place of a eulogy's usual close, the sentence from the contract. He did not announce it as a contract sentence. He read it as what, in that room, it had become: the price of the arrangements selected is guaranteed, and no further sum shall be asked of the family at the time of need. He said that Verna Lott had chosen that sentence in 2003 as the governing sentence of her arrangements, and had checked its performance twice a year for the rest of her life, and that a person is entitled to be remembered by the sentence she governed herself by, and that hers had held. He did not explain what it had cost for it to hold, or whose shares had paid for its holding, or in what drawer its twin had slept. The congregation, most of whom knew, and all of whom understood the genre of the occasion, received the sentence in the silence that rooms reserve for arithmetic that has come out even at last.