The Wagon Wheel catered its own owner's funeral lunch, and the general opinion of New Ghent, Wisconsin, held that Orv Detloff would have found that efficient.
St. Hubert's had been standing room at ten on Wednesday morning — every pew taken, a row of men along the back wall holding their caps like collection plates. By noon it had all moved the half mile out the bay road to the supper club, where the first northeast blow of the fall had the sign groaning on its chains and a gray chop running at the shore. Inside, the dining room smelled of ham, coffee, and forty-three years.
Dot Mercier stood at the tail of the buffet line and did what she did with any room, which was total it. Three hams from Deneys' Market, call it two hundred dollars. Eleven casseroles off the Legion Auxiliary's ovens, green bean running wild rice eight to three. And on its own table, Belgian pie — prune and rice, cut in sixths, the slices the Auxiliary sells at Kermiss for four dollars apiece. Today they were free. Free was the expensive kind.
Peg came down the table with a spatula she'd brought from home. "Eight bean casseroles, Dot. Eight. This town grieves in green bean, and I won't be judged for counting."
"You brought two hams."
"Ham is scripture. Bean is commentary."
"Who's minding the shop?"
"Closed till two. Grief beats minnows." She moved on, straightening what needed no straightening.
Kurt Vandehey held the carving station as he had every working Friday of his life, apron strings doubled, laying ham onto plates as though the ham were the argument he was winning.
"Fish fry Friday?" Gus Delfosse asked, plate out.
"Fish fry Friday. Perch Friday, prime rib Saturday, same as the man built it. Nothing changes, folks."
"Who's frying?" somebody's grandmother wanted to know.
"I am," Kurt said. "Same as the last twenty-two years. You'll come, Doris, and you'll get your tartar on the side, like always." Nobody had asked whose name the license would wear come spring. He answered it anyway. Between plates he checked the phone the way a man checks a minnow trap, and every time it came up empty the next slice came off thinner.
Dale Detloff had the family table by the photo wall and was steering it like a pontoon, slow and wide. Black golf shirt, as far as his closet bent toward a funeral; the toothpick had made it through the mass. "Straightforward estate, chief," he told Marv Deneys over a ham sandwich. "Building, land, the works. My job now is settling it clean and fast — that's what family's for. Cremation, simple, like he'd want. No sense dragging it into winter."
"Lot of building to settle," Marv said, paying for his sandwich with a change of subject.
"Lot of building, lot of land. It settles quick if nobody makes it complicated." Dale's grief ran a half second behind his face, like bad dubbing. Dot filed the sandwich, the hurry, and the word cremation, and moved down the room.
The navy coat stood by the coat rack, coffee and no plate. Ren Colby had posted herself where the whole room could be read at once — the buyer, paying respects, and the town allowed it the way a farm allows the appraiser.
"Company from away," Father Bert said at Dot's shoulder, holding a mug he had no plans to drink. His eyes went down the navy coat the way he went down a parish register, certain the name was on the page. "The hotel woman. Would you know her people?"
"Her people are a spreadsheet, Father."
"I'd have said Door County. Somewhere in the jaw."
"You keep a register of jaws now?"
"I keep the parish, Dorothy. Faces come back — give me till the pie runs out."
The kitchen door swung on a rhythm, and the rhythm was Bonnie Tetzlaff. Out with pie, in with empties, a hand for a shoulder here, a folding chair under a widow there before the knees went. Her pumpkin sweater showed at the apron's edge. "Left urn's fresh, right one's been standing since the Rosary — pour accordingly. Cups come back to the cart, ladies. We pour till the urns quit and not a minute past."
She fetched up at Dot's elbow with a plate. "Rice pie, hon. Sit before you drop — grief runs faster through an empty stomach." The plate arrived in Dot's hands without a vote. The pie was good. It was better than good, and Dot ate it standing up, under the ceiling, and did not look at what the ceiling was holding.
Arlene Vandermause asked the question the room had been chewing since Sunday. "What happens to you, Bonnie, if it sells?"
"New owners bring their own office girl, hon. Twenty-four years and I come with the wallpaper." The laugh started out fine and came down on nothing, like a porch step missing in the dark. She patted Arlene's arm and gathered cups.
At the next table the Delfosse women had the how of it out again — his chair, his sleep, his heart. Bonnie set her cups down among them for exactly one sentence.
"Poor Orv never could keep those pills straight since they changed the color on him," she said, gentle as a casserole, and took the cups through the swinging door.
Dot stood with her empty pie plate and let the entry lie crooked in the file. The organizer on his counter had shown six little doors open and one shut — a man squared with every day he was given. She didn't audit it. It was a funeral.
The room ran hot — ovens, neighbors, wool — and she flicked the fan open and put it to work, slow. Let the Auxiliary read it for grief. A woman fanning herself at a funeral can stand next to anybody and listen as long as she pleases, and no one wonders a thing.
Overhead, past the ceiling tile and one locked door, in rooms the estate sealed Sunday, sat a safe holding a thing of her mother's — thirty years kept, three days out of reach.
The lunch broke in shifts, the Auxiliary decanting leftovers into Cool Whip tubs while the urns went cold.
Lu was waiting at the door with Dot's coat held out like a verdict. "Home, Dot. Peg's boxing you a plate whether you eat it or not. You've inventoried every soul in this room twice — I stood right here and watched. He's dead, Dot, not audited."
"Well," Dot said.
"That's what worries me," Lu said.
She buttoned her coat. The reply she didn't say out loud got filed with the rest, dated and initialed: then why won't the file close?
The northeast wind met her in the gravel lot with both hands. Her phone went off against her hip — a Green Bay number, then a voice from two floors above her old cubicle at Voyageur Mutual.
"Dorothy Mercier? Regional office — don't hang up on me. The Detloff estate carries its coverage through us, and probate needs an appraisal inventory. Contents, fixtures, the works — somebody local who knows what things cost. We were hoping—"
"Yes," Dot said.
"—you'd want to hear the fee first. It isn't much."
"You'll tell me tomorrow." Above her the sign swung and complained about the wind. "I'll bring my own clipboard."
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