…”that you weren’t the only one keeping it.”
Uncle Al had come to the door behind me, still holding the potato bowl. He looked at the seven people on his porch and frowned, the way he does when he’s trying to remember a name.
The woman with the cane introduced herself as Mrs. Odom. Her husband had died in 2011. Al had buried him and never sent a bill. She’d found out a few years later that her family wasn’t the only one. So she’d started asking around.
“There are two hundred and twelve names in your book,” she said. “We found a hundred and eighty-six of the families. We’ve been putting money aside, a little at a time, for six years. Twenty dollars here. Fifty there. Whatever anyone could.”
She handed him an envelope. Inside was a cashier’s check and a single sheet of paper. A copy of a ledger, in her handwriting, with the same two hundred and twelve names in the same order. Next to each name she’d written “paid in full.” And the date each family had finished paying.
It came to just over seventy-one thousand dollars. Al had taken out a second mortgage on the funeral home in 2014 to keep it open. Mrs. Odom had found that out too. The check was enough to pay it off.
My uncle sat down on his own porch step in the rain. I’ve never seen him cry. He didn’t cry then either. He just held that sheet of paper very carefully, the way he holds everything.
Behind me, in the doorway, Brandon had come to see what was happening. He was reading over my shoulder, and I felt him go stiff.
Halfway down the list, in Mrs. Odom’s neat handwriting, was a name he knew. “Dolores Pratt, 2016. Paid in full by her grandson.”
Dolores Pratt was Brandon’s grandmother.
Brandon had been twenty-three when she died, broke, and between jobs. He’d told everyone the family “handled it.” He’d never asked who handled it. He’d never known it was the man he’d just called worthless over Sunday dinner.
“Wait,” he said, his voice cracking. “Paid by her grandson? I didn’t pay anything.”
Mrs. Odom looked at him kindly. “Your mother called me last month, honey. She paid it in your name. She said you’d want it that way, once you knew.”
Brandon didn’t say anything. He walked out onto the porch in his socks, in the rain, and sat down next to my uncle. After a minute, he said, “Thank you for taking care of Grandma.”
Al patted his knee. “She was easy. She liked roses.”
Brandon did an episode of his podcast about Uncle Al the following week. He turned off the ring light for it. It’s the most-listened-to episode he’s ever made.
