She turned off the lamp. She made her round of the house, the doors and the lights, in the order of the round since she was a girl doing it at her father's instruction, and she came out at last under the porte-cochere, into the evening, and locked the door behind her, and stood a moment in the street's quiet with her keys in her hand.
The light was the light of that hour in the new year when the day has finished its business and the street has not yet begun its night: a low, level, amber light that comes across the fields west of the county and lays itself along Main Street without shadow, the light sign painters call the reading light, because it is the light in which a sign must finally justify itself to the street. The painter had come that morning, while the family was at the grave, and had inspected his enamel in the morning's light and approved it, and had left his ladder leaning against the wall for one more night, because the gilt of the last letter wanted a final touch in the morning and because painters, like funeral directors, keep their own schedules of completion and do not apologize for them. It leaned there still, in the evening, beneath the sign, its feet in the flower bed her mother had planted and the home had kept, its top resting against the white wall under the letters, an ordinary ladder, left by a workingman who would return for it, in a town that had learned, at some cost, to leave its instruments where its work could find them.
Above it, in the reading light, the sign carried the family name alone. BOOKER FUNERAL HOME, in the green-black enamel and the gilt, in the letters the house had carried from 1946, restored stroke by stroke over the winter by a man who painted names the way the family kept contracts — from the record, in sequence, to be read by anybody, in the light in which they would actually be read. There was no smaller line beneath it, and no other name above it, and the street, keeping its minutes as streets do, received it the way it had received the house's promises for ninety years: as a sentence posted where it could be checked, by anyone, at any hour, against the drawer inside. Denise stood in the amber light and read it once, the way her father had taught the family to read every document of consequence — aloud, in the place where it would have to be kept — though she read it, this once, in silence, because the street was empty and the checking was complete and the house behind her held, in a deep drawer, in date order, under a certified seal, the proof of every word of it: and then she went up the steps, and in through the door, to the apartment stairs, where the varnish was worn to the wood by the hands of her family, going up to tell her father that the day's work was finished, and that the folder was filed, and that the balance, in the book and in the trust and in the drawer, stood where it had been promised, ninety years and one winter ago, that it would stand: at none, and paid in full, and honored to the letter, to the cent.