Chapter 7

I got back to the funeral home at 11:50 with the ledger, the will, the returned cards, and a key in my pocket.

The receiving room was empty. The chairs were stacked, the coffee urn was unplugged, the easel portrait had been turned to face the wall. Under the dim side-table lamp, the casket spray looked like something out of a museum - fifty white roses holding a deliberate gap, one sprig of rosemary flat across it.

Wade Pruitt was sitting on the arm of a folding chair in the dark, waiting for me.

"Geneva called you," he said.

"She hasn't called me."

"She will. I asked her to." He stood up. "You took the key to the shop."

"I did."

"Hattie." He came closer, and it was the closest he'd been all night, and I made myself not move. "I want to save you some pain. I've known you since you were a baby. I knew your mother better than anybody in this room."

"You knew my mother."

"Better than you think." He said it softly. "I'm not going to lie to you now. The account was mine. I opened it. I paid it for the first three years and then Eula-May found out and took it over, and I let her, because that was the arrangement."

"What arrangement."

"The arrangement we made in July of '97 at that table," he said. "Ruthie needed to go. Everybody at that table knew it. If she'd stayed in Ridgeline pregnant and unmarried, with that land hanging over her, those cousins would have taken her apart in front of a judge. I got her out with a roof over her head and money every month and a place to raise you. And I never asked her for one thing back."

"And the paper."

"Was her mother's idea." He didn't blink. "Ask Ross. Ask anybody. Eula-May wanted the land clean."

"Ross says he didn't notarize it."

Wade's face didn't change much. It changed a little.

"Ross is fifty-eight and drinks two fingers of bourbon every night at the Elks," he said. "He doesn't remember Tuesday. He remembers what he feels like remembering."

Then he leaned in and his voice went low and kind, and this was the part I will remember until I die.

"Hattie, listen to me as a friend. Monday morning, that land closes. Fourteen million dollars goes to Della and Lee and me, and it goes whether you fight or not, because you have no lawyer, no money, and no paper that a judge will take seriously. What you do have is a job, and a town, and a life here. Don't trade all three for a card with two letters on it."

My phone buzzed. Geneva Pike. The owner of Ridgeline Funeral Home, sixty-eight years old, who hired me when I was twenty-four and out of work.

I answered it in front of him.

"Take a few days, honey," Geneva said. "I'm not firing you. I want that on the record. But I've had three phone calls tonight, and I need the room to cool off."

I hung up and looked at Wade Pruitt.

"Three days," he said. "That's all you've got."

I drove home with my mother's thimble against my chest and the card in my pocket, and I sat at my kitchen table until two in the morning with the ledger open, reading the two letters in the corner over and over.

W.P. W.P. W.P.

Except - I'd been reading them as a name for six hours, and names aren't what Eula-May wrote on cards.

Eula-May wrote dates.

I turned the card over and put it under my kitchen light, and I looked at the tag stamp again, up in the corner where the shop put the order stamp.

And there it was, in ink so faded I'd missed it in a funeral home at nine o'clock at night.

The date the order was punched. Not 2016.

March 1998.

The tag on the corner of the card wasn't written on the card in 2016. That card had been sitting in a drawer for eighteen years, and Eula-May had taken it out, and stapled to her own funeral spray the order she never sent.

She didn't leave me a name.

She left me a confession.