My brother planted himself in our garage, the business our father built, and told me to dial 911 and say bikers had just taken a body. “He’s a county case, Lana. County cases get a cardboard box and a shelf, not a flag.” So I dialed. I had no idea yet whose handwriting was on the back of that dead man’s photograph.
In forty minutes the county van was due to haul the man in that box to the crematory, and after that he’d be a number on a plastic tub in a storage closet for three years.
His name was Alberto Delacruz.
Seventy-nine. Found in a motel room off the interstate, nine days in our cooler, and not one person had called about him.
That’s a lie, actually.
Somebody called. Three times.
Every time, Kiran took it in his office with the door shut, and every time he came out and said the same thing.
“Not family. Not my problem.”
Five of them came up the drive on a Thursday a little after two.
They didn’t hurry.
The biggest one had a long gray braid and a leather vest over a red flannel shirt, and he backed an old flatbed up to the bay door like he had an appointment.
I was at the front desk eating saltines out of the sleeve.
Then the roller door went up.
By the time I got to the garage they had Alberto off the cart and halfway to the truck, two men on each side and the big one walking backward at the head end with both hands under the corner.
Kiran came out of his office with his coffee still in his hand.
“Hey. HEY. Put him down.”
Nobody put him down.
“Lana, call it in.” My brother was grinning. I won’t forget that part. “Tell them bikers stole a body. Use those exact words.”
“Kiran, they’re not…”
“USE THOSE WORDS.”
So I did.
The dispatcher wanted a direction. I didn’t have one. Kiran yanked my keys off the hook by the door and shoved them into my chest.
“Follow them. Get me a plate.”
I followed them in my Corolla with the phone face up on the passenger seat and the dispatcher still breathing on the line.
They didn’t speed.
They signaled. They stopped for a yellow.
Past the feed store a motorcycle rolled out of a gas station and slid in behind the flatbed.
Then two more off a farm road.
Then eleven.
By the loop there were forty, maybe more, riding in two tidy lines, and the flatbed up front doing fifty-one in a fifty-five.
Cars were pulled onto the shoulder with phones out the windows. I saw the posts that night. Somebody wrote that grave robbers were heading south and somebody else wrote that they hoped the cops shot the tires.
Three cruisers were waiting at the state veterans cemetery outside Tyler, parked nose to nose across the entrance.
The flatbed stopped.
Every bike behind it stopped too. A hundred and sixty engines cut out almost at once, and the quiet was worse than the noise.
The big one climbed down with his palms open and out from his sides.
A deputy with her hair in a tight bun kept a hand on her belt.
“Who’ve you got in that truck, sir?”
“Alberto Delacruz. Navy. Two tours.”
“He yours?”
“He’s ours.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No ma’am. Not blood.”
“Then you had no business touching him.”
“Nobody with any business ever bothered,” he said.
His name was Butch Madden. He’d ridden with Alberto for twenty-two years. They only knew Bert was dead because his old Honda sat in that motel lot for a week collecting tickets.
Deputy Goetz had all five of them sit on the curb.
Nobody argued.
Then Butch said there was a folder on the dash and he’d like her to read it before anybody took Bert back.
She read it standing up. I read it over her shoulder, because nobody told me not to.
Discharge papers. A letter from the VA saying he qualified for a plot here, a headstone and an honor guard, all of it free.
And three request forms from the club, asking us to release him for a veterans’ burial.
All three were stamped DENIED.
All three had my brother’s signature.
Kiran pulled up twenty minutes later in the good hearse, like he’d come to collect property.
He walked right past me.
“Arrest them,” he said to the deputy. “That’s a county contract in that truck. He’s eleven hundred and fifty dollars to me.”
Deputy Goetz held up the forms.
“These are yours?”
Kiran glanced at them and smiled. All his teeth.
“They’re not family. Policy is policy.”
Butch didn’t look at him. He looked at me.
Then he dug a wallet out of his vest, cracked and gone soft as a dish rag, and slid a photograph out of it.
“Was in Bert’s pocket,” he said. “Figured somebody from your place ought to see it.”
Two young sailors on a pier, squinting, arms hooked around each other’s necks.
One was Alberto.
The other was our father.
I grew up with that face over my cereal bowl.
Kiran saw it too. His smile went somewhere and didn’t come back.
Butch turned the photo over.
Dad’s handwriting, the same fat capitals he used on the price list in the lobby. IF I GO FIRST, YOU CARRY ME.
And under it, in blue ballpoint, newer, a second line.
I knew that handwriting too.
It was Kiran’s.
The hood of the hearse
HE WENT FIRST. I’LL CARRY YOU. K.A. 3-21-20.
That’s what it said.
It was the slanted print my brother uses on every form that leaves our building.
I took the photo out of Butch’s fingers. He let me.
The date was the Saturday we buried our father.
“Kiran,” I said. “When did you write this?”
“That’s not mine.” He didn’t even look at it. “Anybody can print a K.”
“You wrote it on the hood of your daddy’s hearse,” Butch said. “I was right there beside you. You borrowed the pen off me and then you kept it.”
Deputy Goetz looked from the photo to my brother to the flatbed.
A rider by the wall had a hand over his mouth.
Two women on the sidewalk had their phones up.
“Here’s where I am,” the deputy said. “I’ve got a body that left a licensed home without a release. I’ve got three forms with your name denying a release.”
She tapped the folder against her leg.
“I can’t sort out who’s right standing in a cemetery gate.”
“So he comes back to us,” Kiran said.
“He goes back where he was, until somebody shows me paper that says otherwise.”
Butch nodded once, like he’d expected it.
He didn’t argue that either.
Kiran held out his hand to me. For a second I thought he wanted the photo.
“Keys,” he said. “You’re riding with me.”
I just looked at him.
“You’re going to write out what you saw for the deputy. And you’re going to use the word forcibly.”
I gave him my keys.
I kept the photo in my other hand, flat against my leg.
He never asked for it back. Why wouldn’t he ask for it back?
Dad’s lobby
You need to know what that building was before you know what my brother did in it.
Dad bought it in 1991 off a man who was retiring to Galveston.
It had been a tire shop before that. That’s why the garage has a bay door and not a nice side entrance like the homes in town.
He painted the price list himself and hung it in the lobby. Every service, every casket, every urn, in those fat capitals.
Under the bottom line he wrote A MAN PAYS AHEAD SO HIS FAMILY DOESN’T HAVE TO.
He sold a lot of what they call pre-need.
People paid him a little every month for years. When they died, it was already handled.
He kept the contracts in a gray file cabinet in the back hall. PRE-NEED was taped across the top drawer, and the bottom drawer always stuck.
I didn’t work there growing up. I did hair for nineteen years.
Then my divorce went through and my wrists gave out about the same spring. Kiran said there was a desk if I wanted it.
That was four years ago. Dad had already been gone two.
He left the place to both of us, half and half.
It’s in the will, typed, with his capitals scrawled at the bottom.
Kiran had the license, so Kiran ran it.
I answered the phone and did the flowers and the guest books and sorted the mail.
“Your half’s on paper,” he told me once, laughing, when I asked to see the books. “Paper doesn’t pay you. I do.”
I let that go.
I had eleven thousand dollars in the credit union that I’d saved for a house of my own. I thought if I kept my head down I’d get there.
I need to tell you about Dad’s funeral too.
March of 2020. The state had just said ten people at a service, no more.
Kiran was thirty-three and running his first big one, and it was our father.
We couldn’t get six pallbearers inside the limit.
Cousins in Laredo couldn’t come. My ex wouldn’t.
Then motorcycles started pulling into the lot. Maybe twenty of them.
Old men in masks and vests stood apart from each other on the gravel, the way the news said to.
One of them came up to Kiran at the hearse and said something I couldn’t hear.
Six of those men carried our father out of the chapel.
I never knew their names. Everybody had a mask on.
I was holding a guest book with nine signatures in it.
Afterward one of them handed Kiran a photograph.
Kiran laid it on the hood of the hearse and wrote on the back with a pen somebody gave him. He cried while he did it.
I remember that because I’d never seen him cry.
A week later he gave me an envelope. Dad’s capitals across it: LANA — SPARES.
“He said give you these,” Kiran said. “For when I lose mine.”
It was a ring of keys.
I put it in my kitchen drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus, and I forgot it.
That Thursday Kiran drove me back from Tyler in the good hearse with Bert in the back.
Neither of us said anything for the first ten miles.
The bikes followed us the whole way, two tidy lines in the side mirror, and he kept checking them.
“You know what they’ll post tonight?” he said finally. “That we chase old men down the highway.”
“We did chase him down the highway.”
He turned the radio on. Then he turned it off.
He’d never once let a county case ride in this hearse.
Four-thirty
The county van came at four-thirty, the way it always did on Thursdays.
The driver was a kid named Seth. He always called me ma’am and always ate one of the mints out of the dish on my desk.
Kiran met him in the garage before I could get there.
“Paperwork problem,” he said. “Come back Friday. Eight sharp.”
Seth looked at the cooler door, and then at the bikes lined up along our fence.
Butch and maybe thirty of them had followed us home.
They were sitting on their bikes with the engines off, drinking out of a cooler of their own.
“Yes sir,” Seth said, and he took two mints on his way out.
Kiran shut the office door. Then he opened it again and told me to come in.
He had my statement on his desk already. He’d written it himself, in my voice.
I observed five members of a motorcycle gang forcibly remove the deceased.
“Sign it,” he said. “Goetz wants it tonight.”
“They weren’t forcible. They carried him like he was made of glass.”
“Lana.” He put his hands flat on the desk. “Do you know what our line of credit is right now?”
I didn’t.
“Thirty-eight thousand. Do you know what pays the interest on it every month? County cases.”
He held up one finger.
“Eleven-fifty a head, every one, on the first. That’s the only check in this building that never bounces.”
“So give them one less.”
“It isn’t one less. If that club walks him out of here, every family in town reads that we lose bodies.”
He leaned closer.
“The county pulls the contract and the bank pulls the line. And your desk goes with it.”
He held out a pen. One of our blue ones, with the name of the home on the side.
There’s a cup of them on my desk and he takes them by the handful.
I didn’t take it.
“I’ll sign it in the morning,” I said. “After I read the forms again.”
That was supposed to buy me a night.
Kiran picked up his phone and called the sheriff’s office while I was standing there.
He asked for somebody to clear his parking lot of trespassers.
Then he looked at me over the phone.
“You can go home, Lana. I’ll lock up.”
Butch’s cooler
I didn’t go home.
I went out the side door and across the gravel to the fence, where the riders were packing up.
A cruiser was idling at the end of the drive with its lights off.
Butch was the last one still sitting. He had the folder on his knee.
“Your brother called the law on us,” he said. “Again.”
“He’s my brother.”
“I know it.”
He reached into the cooler at his boot and held a can of root beer out to me. I took it. It was the first thing I’d had since the saltines.
I gave him back the photograph.
He held it a while and then put it in his vest pocket.
“Can I ask you something,” I said. “Why did Bert carry that? It’s six years old.”
Butch took his time.
“Bert didn’t have anybody. Wife passed in ’02. No kids. He had your daddy, and then he had us.”
He turned the folder over in his hands.
“Your daddy told him a long time ago he’d see to it. Bert paid him for it.”
“Paid him how?”
“Money orders. Sixty-five dollars a month. Six years, I want to say.”
He almost smiled.
“He used to tell us it was the only bill he ever paid on time.”
He opened the folder and slid something out from behind the discharge papers.
It was a little receipt book, the cheap kind with carbon copies, the cover curled up from a hot dash.
“Found it in his room at the motel when we went for his things.”
He tapped the cover.
“I didn’t show it to the deputy. I didn’t know what it was worth, and I didn’t want your brother to tell me.”
I held it open under the light from the cruiser.
Every page was a pink carbon in Dad’s capitals.
DELACRUZ, A. — $65 — PRE-NEED. Month after month. 2003, 2004, 2005, on and on.
The last one was from October of 2009.
PAID IN FULL. VA TRANSPORT AND SERVICE. CASKET NO. 14. THANK YOU BERT.
Casket number fourteen is still on the price list in our lobby.
It’s the plain oak one.
“He bought it,” I said. “He bought all of it.”
“He bought it twenty years ago,” Butch said. “And your brother stamped him county.”
The bottom drawer
The gray cabinet wasn’t in the back hall anymore.
Kiran had moved it into his office the spring before, and he kept that office locked.
When I’d asked why, he said the state likes records secured.
I knew one other thing about that spring.
A letter had come for him in April from the Texas Department of Banking. I’d sorted it with the florist bills.
I’d held it up and said what’s this. He’d taken it out of my hand so fast it tore the corner.
He told me it was a form letter. Every home in Texas got one.
I drove home and took the envelope out of my kitchen drawer.
LANA — SPARES. Seven keys on a ring.
One of them had a piece of masking tape that said OFFICE in Dad’s capitals.
Dad never changed a lock in his life. Neither had Kiran.
I sat in my car in my own driveway for a long time with the ring in my lap.
I thought about Dad’s lobby sign. I thought about Kiran crying on the hood of a hearse.
Then I started the car.
I parked behind the building a little after eleven.
The cruiser was gone. The bikes were gone. Kiran’s truck was gone.
The office key went in on the first try.
The cabinet was against the wall behind his chair, with PRE-NEED still taped across the top.
I pulled out the top drawer and went through it with my phone flashlight. A to M. No Delacruz.
The bottom drawer stuck, the way it always had.
I had to put my foot on the cabinet and pull with both hands. It came out all at once and hit my shin.
There were maybe a dozen folders in the back, behind the hanging files.
Each one had a contract in Dad’s capitals and a pink form stapled to it.
The first folder I pulled said DELACRUZ, A.
Dad’s contract was inside, signed by both of them in 2003.
Total paid, $4,875. Casket No. 14. Transport to the state veterans cemetery. Notify the Aguirre children on death.
Stapled on top of it was a trust withdrawal form, dated June of 2021.
CONTRACT VOID — NO CONTACT 10+ YRS — FUNDS RETURNED TO OPERATING.
The full $4,875. Out of the trust and into the business.
In blue ballpoint.
In the slanted print my brother uses on every form that leaves our building.
I pulled the next folder. CASTILLO, R. Same pink form, same month, same words.
The next. PRUITT, D.
I had nine of them out on the floor when the overhead light came on.
Kiran was standing at the office door with his truck keys in his hand.
“Those are Dad’s,” he said. “Put them back.”
Kiran’s office, eleven fifty
He didn’t come in right away.
He waited at the threshold like it was somebody else’s office.
“Where’d you get a key?”
I held up the ring. He looked at the masking tape, and something moved in his face and then stopped.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So you found the drawer. You want to know what’s in it, I’ll tell you what’s in it.”
He came in and sat on the edge of his own desk, above me and the folders.
“Dad died with four thousand dollars in the operating account. Four.”
He held up four fingers, like I might not believe it.
“You know what he had in that trust? Every dime of it, sitting there for people who were going to live another twenty years.”
“Kiran.”
“And a roof that leaked on the caskets. And two hearses with three hundred thousand miles on them. And a payroll.”
“You had the license,” I said.
“I had the license. I had the bank. I had the state calling. You had the guest books.”
He rubbed his face.
“I didn’t take from families. You understand me? I went through every one of those, and I picked the ones that were old men nobody had called about in ten years.”
He counted it off.
“No wife. No kids. Nobody. Who gets hurt by that? They die, the county pays eleven-fifty, it all comes out even.”
“Bert,” I said.
“Bert was in a motel off the interstate. I didn’t even know he was alive.”
He stopped.
“I didn’t know he was still alive.”
“You knew him when the club called.”
Kiran laughed, a short one, through his nose.
“The first time they called, I looked him up and saw the contract number and I about threw up. That’s the truth.”
He looked at the ceiling.
“And then I thought about it. If I release him to a veterans’ burial, I’ve got to deliver what that contract says. A fourteen. Transport. A service.”
“So deliver it.”
“Out of a trust that doesn’t have it? Three months before the state comes back to audit it? That letter you sorted? That’s the audit.”
He picked up DELACRUZ off the floor and held it against his chest like it was his.
“So he’s a county case. It’s clean. He goes to the crematory, he sits on a shelf, the contract never comes up, the state never asks.”
His voice went flat.
“And then the club takes him off my cart while the whole town watches.”
“So you made me call it in.”
“I made you call it in because if they’re grave robbers, nobody listens to grave robbers about some old contract.”
He said it like he was explaining a bill.
“That’s all that was. Thieves don’t get believed. It was working, Lana. It was working right up until your boyfriend there took out that picture.”
He looked down at me.
“You want to know about the picture? I meant it when I wrote it.”
He swallowed.
“I was thirty-three and I’d just buried Dad and that man carried him. I meant every word.”
“Then why.”
“Because a year later I had a roof and a bank and four thousand dollars, and nobody was carrying me.”
I put the Castillo folder on top of the Pruitt folder.
“There’s nine,” I said.
“There’s eleven. Two are in my truck.”
He stood up and swung the office door wide.
“If you take those out of this building, there is no building. The state pulls the license. Dad’s place closes.”
He waited.
“Your half of nothing is nothing. Go home. Seth comes at eight. Then this is over.”
Friday, eight o’clock
I didn’t sleep, but I went home.
I took the nine folders with me in a laundry basket.
At seven-fifteen I sat at my kitchen table and wrote a check from the credit union for $4,875.
It was the most I’d ever written.
I made it out to the home, with Dad’s name still on the account, and put DELACRUZ PRE-NEED on the memo line.
My hand shook on the zero. I wrote it again on a fresh check and tore up the first one.
Then I called the number at the top of the Banking letter. I’d taken a picture of it on Kiran’s desk on my way out.
A woman answered at seven-thirty.
I told her who I was, and that I was an owner, and that I had eleven contracts she’d want to see.
She asked me to spell my brother’s name.
I got to the home at seven-forty. Kiran’s truck was already there.
He was in the garage with the cooler open, and Bert on the cart in his cardboard container, ready for the van.
He’d been crying, or he hadn’t slept either.
He saw the laundry basket.
“No,” he said. “No. You put those back in my office right now.”
I put a release form on the cart. Our letterhead.
Released to the care of the state veterans cemetery, per pre-need contract, signed by me as owner of record.
And the check, clipped to it.
He read it. Then he read it again.
“You can’t sign that. You don’t have a license.”
“I don’t need a license to honor a contract. I asked.”
“Asked who?”
He looked at my face, and I didn’t answer, and he got there on his own.
“You called them. You called the state.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what you just did? You just closed Dad’s place. Thirty-five years.”
He stepped toward me.
“Do you get that? You just put his name on a state file and you closed it.”
His voice went up.
“Over a man you met yesterday.”
“I met him in 2020,” I said. “He carried Dad.”
“Oh, so now it’s about Dad. Where was this when I was carrying Dad’s bills? Where were you?”
He pointed down the hall toward my desk.
“Eating crackers by the phone, that’s where.”
The county van came up the drive at eight. Seth got out with his clipboard.
“Morning, ma’am. Morning, sir. I got one for pickup?”
“You got nothing,” Kiran said. “Go on back.”
“No,” I said. “He’s not yours, Seth. He’s ours. He’s paid for.”
I handed Seth the release form. He read it slow, and then he looked at Kiran.
Kiran didn’t say anything at all.
“I just need a name on the line that says I didn’t take him,” Seth said. “Either of you.”
I took one of the blue pens out of my pocket and signed his clipboard.
Then I walked to the wall and pushed the button, and the roller door went up.
Tuesday, ten a.m.
It took the cemetery four days to get the honor guard.
I took casket number fourteen off the showroom floor myself. Plain oak.
I had to ask Butch and two of the riders to help me lift Bert into it. Kiran didn’t come in Monday, and on Tuesday he didn’t come in either.
There’s a notice taped to our entrance now from the Texas Department of Banking.
The woman I talked to said it would be months before anybody knows if the place stays open.
I’ve got a little over six thousand dollars left in the credit union. I quit looking at houses.
The price list is still in the lobby.
I haven’t figured out yet whether I’m allowed to take it down.
At nine-thirty Tuesday Butch backed the old flatbed up to our bay door like he had an appointment.
This time he did.
They didn’t hurry.
We rode out to Tyler at fifty-one in a fifty-five, and every bike in East Texas must have been behind us.
Nobody pulled onto the shoulder this time. A man at the feed store took his cap off.
At the cemetery an honor guard of three old sailors and a girl in dress whites folded the flag.
They handed it to Butch, and Butch handed it to me.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I held it.
Before they closed the lid I put the photograph in Bert’s shirt pocket, face down, so both lines were facing up.
Then six of us lifted. Butch at the foot. Four riders on the sides.
I took the head end, the way he had in our garage.
I walked backward with both hands under the corner, and I didn’t let go.
If someone who loves you served, ask them tonight who they’d want carrying them, and write it down somewhere your family will find it.
Family loyalties can turn painfully complicated, as these stories of a father’s harsh judgment and a brother controlling the family checkbook show. For a quieter kind of family mystery, read about the husband who left every first Saturday.
