The Business Line

On her first morning as the owner, Nora called the funeral homes from the wall phone.

That's the business line. It's an old phone with a cord, mounted by the door to the walk-in cooler. Marian never let anybody take it out. Her reasoning was that people having the worst week of their lives shouldn't have to wonder whether they'd reached somebody's cell.

I was at the sink doing sheet pans. I drive the van for Doyle Catering and I wash what comes back in it. Fourteen years this past May.

Nora called Brandt-Hollis first, then Peterka & Sons, then Mercer Family. She told each of them the same thing. Doyle had a new owner. Starting this week it was doing weekday lunches for offices, and it wasn't doing funerals anymore. She was sorry for the short notice. She thanked them for the years.

She saved Gene Mercer for last. Gene had known her since she was fifteen and standing at the same sink I was standing at.

I could hear his voice through the receiver but not what he was saying. Nora said, "I know, Gene. I know." She said it a few more times. Then she told him she had to get going, and she hung up and wrote the time next to his name on a legal pad. That's a habit she brought home from the hospital.

That was Monday, June 2, 2042. At 11:15 I pulled out with forty-two boxed lunches for an engineering firm downtown. I was back by a quarter to one and had the pans done by one.

Marian Doyle is sixty-six. The first thing she ever catered was a funeral, her uncle's, out of her mother's kitchen. After that she did graduations and retirement parties and they paid fine. But when she said "the business," she meant the funerals. Everybody knew that.

How it went, Gene would call, usually at night. A family had lost somebody and didn't know what they wanted. Marian would tell him they didn't need to know. She asked three things. How many people, where, and was there anything anybody couldn't eat. Then she told them what they were getting and what it cost, and they said yes, because they were tired of being asked things.

After the service people would find her by the coffee. They'd hang onto her hand and say they didn't know what they'd have done without her. She'd tell them they'd have been fine. Then in the van she'd say, "That was nice of her," and look out the window a while. She meant it, every time.

She kept a green notebook in the driver's side door pocket. No recipes in it. It was names, people who turned up at a lot of services at Mercer's because they'd lived on the south side their whole lives and knew everybody.

Ed Ruhl. Black coffee. Sits down first, get him a chair.

Vang sisters. Hot water, no tea bag. They bring their own.

Bev Delacorte. Sweet tea. Will ask if it's sweet. Say yes.

Some of the names had a line through them and a date. Ed Ruhl has a line through him. August 9. I carried the coffee at his.

If I had to guess when Nora decided, I'd say last August. She's never told me.

End of July it got hot and stayed hot. The county called five red days in a row. On a red day, offices send everybody home and the buses run a short schedule. Anybody who can stay in, stays in.

You don't bury somebody on a red day if you can help it, and that week nobody could. The medical examiner had refrigerated trailers parked behind the building. Gene told Marian they were full.

The heat broke on a Sunday. About ten days after that the bodies started getting released to the funeral homes, all of them close together, and everybody's funeral landed in the same week.

We did nine in six days. Most were graveside at seven in the morning, because by ten it was too hot for old people to stand on grass. I was loading at four-thirty. One family told Marian fifty and ninety showed up. She cut the sandwiches in half on the tailgate. When the food was gone she told people she was sorry, there was still coffee.

She ran every pan on a clock. When something came out of the warmer or the van cooler, she put a strip of masking tape on the lid and wrote the time on it. Four hours later it went in the trash, no matter who was still in line. She wrote every one of those times in a spiral log too, in case anybody from the county ever wanted to see it.

One morning the hearse was almost two hours late. We stood there and watched the sun come up over the headstones. Marian threw out three pans of ham before anybody ate a bite.

The sixth day, after we packed up, she sat down on the van bumper and stayed there. I brought her a water. She held onto it but she didn't drink any.

Nora drove down the next morning and finished out the week for her. She was doing scheduling for a hospital then, nurse shifts mostly, and she used up her vacation days on it. In March she gave her notice.

Most of the paperwork was May.

The county won't let a food license pass from one owner to the next. The new owner has to get their own. Nora didn't fight it. She filled out the forms and paid the fee, and an inspector came and went through the kitchen with a flashlight and a probe thermometer.

When he was done, Nora went up to the front office to copy the temperature logs for him. He stayed in the kitchen writing on his tablet, and Marian asked him something. I was in dry storage and heard it. She wanted to know what it would take for somebody else to cook out of this same kitchen under their own name. He said every business sharing a kitchen needs its own license. Marian said thank you, that's what she figured.

I didn't tell Nora. Nobody asked me not to. I just never did.

Nora's license came in the mail. She asked me to take Marian's down off the wall. I put it in an envelope and left it on Marian's chair.

The insurance couldn't move over either, so Nora got her own policy. The landlord put the lease in Nora's name and left Marian's on it too, in case. So Marian kept her key. Most mornings she still came in at six and drank her coffee at the steel table.

The phone number went last.

That number's been painted on the van doors since before my time. It's on a magnet on the fridge at Mercer's and on cards at the other two. Gene knows it by heart. He told me once he called it the night his own mother died and never had to look it up.

Nora wanted to keep it. The office accounts she'd lined up already had it, and a new number would cost her business she'd already done the work to get.

The phone company needed both of them to sign a transfer form. It sat on the steel table with a pen on it for two days.

The third morning Marian sat down with her coffee and picked up the pen.

"You know what they say to me," she said. "The families. They say, I don't even know what to ask for. And I say, you don't have to. That's the job."

"That's not the whole job," Nora said. "The whole job is ninety people when they told you fifty."

"Fine." Marian signed. "And I like being thanked. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I don't."

Nora signed under her. Neither of them said anything else about it. Nora drove the form over herself.

The engineering firm is called Kessler. Forty-two people, lunch Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, out the door at 11:15.

That first Monday, when I got back from the delivery, Nora was sitting on an upturned bucket on the loading dock with her phone. Kessler had emailed at 8:40 that morning, while I was still loading. The forecast had heat coming in Wednesday, and they were canceling Wednesday and Thursday.

She read me the terms out of their contract. If Kessler canceled more than three days out, they owed nothing. One to three days out, they paid half. Less than a day, they paid all of it. Wednesday was inside three days, so they owed half. Thursday was three days and a couple of hours away, so they owed nothing. She hadn't bought food for either one yet, so she was out nothing.

"They send everybody home on red days," she said. "So they have to make the call three days ahead or they pay for it."

I said that was a lot to ask of somebody.

"That's what I'm selling them." She put the phone in her pocket. "They know on Monday what Thursday looks like. So I know, and you know." She looked out at the lot for a while. "You told me she never drank that water."

She stood up and set the bucket back by the door. "Those calls come about ten days after it gets hot. And it's supposed to get hot Wednesday."

She went in. I stayed out on the dock a while longer.

Funerals were overtime for me, and I won't lie about that. Last August paid off my truck, nine services at time and a half, plus what families pressed into my hand in the parking lot.

Lunches were five in the morning to one in the afternoon. Steady. Then I'd go home and have the rest of the day to stay out of the heat.

I worked Monday and Tuesday for the other accounts.

Tuesday afternoon, after I got back, a repairman came to look at the cooler in the van. It had been running warm since spring. He had to pull the inside panel off the driver's door, so I emptied the door pocket and set what was in it on the seat. The green notebook was in there with the fuel receipts.

When Marian came out to see how he was doing, she saw it. She picked it up and put it in her purse. Nora was standing right there with her clipboard. She watched, and then she looked back down at the clipboard.

The county called red days Wednesday through Saturday, same as the forecast said. I stayed home. Mostly I sat in my truck in the driveway with the air going and the radio on, because the truck cools down faster than the house does.

The heat broke Sunday, June 8. Monday morning Nora showed me on her phone that Kessler had paid the half on Friday. She didn't say anything about it.

Gene called the business line the Monday after next. I could tell it was him from how Nora said hello.

She listened a long time.

"I know," she said. "No, I understand. I can give you two names." She gave him two other caterers and their numbers off a sticky note she already had stuck to the side of the monitor. "I'm sorry, Gene. I am."

She hung up. This time she didn't write anything down. After a minute she pulled up Thursday's Kessler order and started checking it.

Marian wasn't in that morning. Gene had her cell number. Everybody at Mercer's did.

Thursday I loaded forty-two boxes for Kessler. Nora checked each one against the sheet and handed it to me, and I packed them in the van the way I always do, heavy on the bottom and tight against the bulkhead so nothing slides on the turns.

Marian was at the steel table with her coffee. Her cell phone was on the table next to the cup, screen up. She usually keeps it in her purse.

I didn't ask her about it. Nora didn't either, but I saw her look over at it twice.

Marian hadn't asked me anything yet. Graveside at seven would run right into my lunch loading. I'd been thinking about what I'd say if she did, and I hadn't gotten very far with it.

I pulled out at 11:15. Through the kitchen window I could see the both of them, Nora at the desk with next week's orders and Marian at the table with her coffee and her phone, sitting where she'd see it light up.

I got to Kessler with four minutes to spare. The woman at the front desk signed for the boxes and said see you Monday. I said Monday.

When I got back the phone was still on the table and Marian was still sitting with it. Nora was working on the week after next. I hung the van keys on the hook under the business line and started on the pans.