Elias had come down for the service and had stood, with his cane, at the grave, and afterward, in the chapel's emptying light, he had done a thing Denise had not seen him do since the sale: he had walked to the arrangement office, unaccompanied, and stood in the doorway looking at the desk, and at the drawer in it, which was closed. "Your grandfather built that desk's drawer deeper than the others," he said, when she came to stand beside him. "Did you know that? The contract drawer. He said contracts outlast the men who sign them, so the drawer should be built for the longest-lived thing in the house. Deeper by two inches. He measured the longest contract he had ever seen and added two inches for the future." He rested his hand, with its tremor, flat on the desk's surface, beside the place where the folders had lain. "The future turned out to need all of it," he said. "Every inch of the two inches." He looked at the desk a while longer, and then he said the thing that she understood, later, he had come downstairs to say, in the chapel, on that of all mornings: "Bury me out of this house, Denise, when it comes, under my contract, and enter it the same. None. Your mother first, God rest her, and then me, out of the white house, under the name on the wall. It is all I have ever asked this family to guarantee, and it is the only guarantee in the building that was never in any danger, because you were keeping it." And he went back up the stairs to the apartment, slowly, with his hand on the rail where three generations of the family's hands had worn the varnish to the wood, leaving her alone in the office with the desk, and the drawer, and the day's last work, which was not finished yet.
The spring came on in Houston County the way it always had, indifferent to the paper seasons of Atlanta, and the white house settled into its restored name and its ordinary work, which is the destiny of all institutions that survive their own histories: to become, again, the place where the county's ordinary transactions occur, at the desk, on the worst days and on the prudent ones. The prudent ones resumed first, and then in a steadier traffic. A man of sixty-eight, a retired machinist from the air base, came in on a Tuesday with his wife and sat at the arrangement desk to do the thing that Denise's whole professional life, and her father's, and her grandfather's, had been organized around: he paid, in advance, for his own funeral, so that his children would not have to. He was not a man who had followed the examination in the newspapers. He was a man whose neighbor had received, the previous winter, a letter from a department in Atlanta enclosing a sum of money and a sentence that said the company was wrong, and whose wife had received, quarterly, in an envelope from a trustee whose name she had learned to trust the way one learns to trust a new roof, statements that stated what they stated and could be checked. He had come to the desk because the checking had held. Denise wrote his contract on the successor trustee's approved form, with the guarantee sentence in its place, and she entered the first installment in the passbook style the home had resumed for holders who preferred it, and she showed him, because the new practice of the home — the practice the whole state had relearned at such tuition — required the showing, how his payments would be held, and by whom, and how the certification would reach him quarterly, and what the ratio stood at on the day he signed, which was one hundred point zero, computed contract by contract, a figure he repeated back to her to be sure he had it right, the way a man repeats an unfamiliar psalm. His wife asked whether the price in the contract could ever be amended by a schedule. It was the question of the era, asked at that desk in that wording, and Denise answered it in the contract's wording and the order's, and showed her the sentence, and the clause, and the covenant in the bank's loan that required the annual certification, the three separate documents in which the promise now stood, like a house rebuilt on three foundations because the street had learned what one could cost. The wife read the sentence twice. "Her mother," the machinist said, jerking his head toward his wife, in explanation of the reading, "kept hers in the envelope with her will. Nineteen years. She used to say the paper was in Perry and the spending was in Atlanta." He signed. "We'd like ours in the drawer with hers, if the drawer has room."
"The drawer has room," Denise said. "It was built two inches deep for the future." She filed the contract that afternoon, in the drawer, in a new folder, with the label in her hand, in the section the year's new contracts were making at the drawer's front, ahead of the folders of the dead and the folders of the waiting, which stretched away behind it in their decades, the whole population of the home's promises, each one standing in its row with its name on it, at one hundred point zero percent.