She set her hands in her lap and looked Kelsey dead in the eye. Then my sister said, “Kelsey, when Mama and Daddy go, do you know what it’s going to cost this family?”
The table did not care for that question at a 45th anniversary supper. I did not care for it either, and I am ashamed of that now.
Kelsey said something about how that was morbid.
Dana said, “Nothing. It is going to cost this family nothing. It has been paid for since 2016.”
She had two folders in her purse. Preneed funeral contracts, both of them, from Sanders Memorial on Nineteenth Street, one in our mother’s name and one in our father’s, paid in full, itemized, locked at 2016 prices. Casket, plot, opening and closing, the works.
Eleven thousand four hundred dollars, paid out over sixty-one months, in cash, in an envelope she carried down there herself on the second Tuesday of the month.
Our mother knew. Our father did not, and he found out at his own anniversary supper, and my daddy is not a man who cries in a restaurant and he cried in that restaurant.
Dana did it after Uncle Rayburn died in 2015 and his kids had to pass a hat at the visitation. She said she watched grown men counting twenties in a parking lot outside their own father’s funeral and decided that was never going to happen to us.
Tips. That is all it ever was. Twenty-two years of a woman carrying plates in a town where a good Friday night is a hundred and forty dollars.
The dentures were tips. My rent that winter was tips. And the fact that nobody in this family is going to have to make a single decision about money in the worst week of their lives is also tips.
Clipped inside the front of my mother’s folder is a note in Dana’s handwriting from the day she made the last payment.
Paid in full 3/14/16. Nobody is to be told until they have to be. If I go first, this folder is in the kitchen drawer under the phone book, and somebody is going to owe me a thank-you they cannot give me, and that is all right, that was always the deal.
Kelsey did not say anything for a long time. Her mother-in-law was sitting right there, and my brother was next to her with his face gone red, and I want to say plain that my brother has known about those folders since 2019 and never once corrected his wife at a table.
He is the one who apologized first, actually. To Dana, then to Mama, then to the whole table, and it was not smooth and it took him a while.
Kelsey wrote her a letter. Dana has not shown it to me and I have not asked.
She still works the floor. Five nights, and she is the best server in that building and everybody in Lubbock knows it but us.
And I quit letting it ride. Twenty-two years I let my sister pop up and fill my glass like she was on shift at her own family’s table, and she was already paying for our parents’ funerals while I did it.