The old voice on the line from the nursing home said, Mr Burke, I am ashamed of my boy. Do not sign a thing. I will tell you exactly what that paper in your can means.
It was the funeral directors own father, the man who ran that home for forty years before his son took it over. The paper behind Maviss burial policy, on the funeral homes own letterhead, was a lifetime agreement the old man had made with Mavis back in 1981, the year her daddy died and she paid ahead for both of us, in full.
Mavis, God love her, had prepaid our arrangements forty years ago and made the funeral homes founder put it in writing. The fourteen thousand dollar bill the son sat in Maviss chair and quoted me was already paid. The six thousand from insurance was extra. There was no balance. There was no reason for a lien. The son was simply looking at an old widower in no shape to argue, and at a paid-off house, and he did the arithmetic of a thief.
He told me he would be made whole. He did not know his own father had made us whole in 1981.
The old man asked his daughter to drive the original ledger over to me, and there it was, Maviss payment, recorded in the founders own hand. I took the whole stack, the coffee-can policy, the 1981 agreement, and the fathers ledger, to a lawyer in Dothan.
The son did not put a lien on my house. He sent a letter withdrawing everything and, I am told, his father had some words with him that no screen door could muffle.
I owed nothing. I signed nothing. Maviss camellias bloomed pink again this February, sixty-some years from the spring she planted them, and I sat on the porch in her chair, which is mine to sit in, and I thanked her out loud for being the kind of woman who paid ahead and buried the receipt under the third bush from the steps.