I wrote them a good review

He died on the ninth of February, a Sunday, a little after four, at the hospital in Sugar Land. Not the system I work for. I do Medicare cost reports for a different one and people hear that and think it means something.

Kidneys. Three days a week since 2019, and he never let anybody drive him to it, not once. He never asked me about the chair either. Fourteen years.

I'm the first son, so the money ran through me. That part I can give you exactly, because I had the tab open the whole time.

Nine thousand eight hundred and sixty to the funeral home here. That's the embalming, which has to be done to a different standard when the body is leaving the country. The casket and the zinc liner they solder shut are in there too. So is the aluminum tray the whole thing rides in on the airplane.

Cargo to Lagos was four thousand one hundred on the human remains rate. It goes out of the freight side off JFK Boulevard at four in the morning, not the terminal anybody's picturing. Lagos to the mortuary in Enugu was a van and two men overnight, and that was another six hundred.

The aso ebi was mine to run too. Two hundred and twenty yards of lace at nineteen a yard, and the head ties on top of that. You sell it back to the family at sixty a set and you collect about six out of every ten.

Canopy and four hundred plastic chairs. A cow, an actual cow, eleven hundred. A generator and diesel for two days, because the power out there is what it is. Two hundred and forty plates went out and two hundred and six people ate, and I know that because I counted what came back.

All in, with the flights, thirty-four thousand two hundred and change. My mother asked me twice what it came to and both times I told her we were fine.

I took the five days you get and then I worked. February close goes out on the eleventh business day and it went out.

The man who ran all of it on this end is Emmanuel Mensah. Ghanaian, somewhere in his fifties. He's got a place on Cartwright between a nail place and a tax office. My uncle wanted the people in Stafford instead because they know our people, and Stafford wanted fourteen thousand and wasn't going to do the zinc in house anyway, they were going to send it out and bill me for the trip.

My mother moved into my front bedroom on the tenth of February. She's still in it.

Wake-keeping was the Friday, the twenty-first, at the church on Murphy Road. Mass first and then the hall behind it. There's a part where the casket goes out and the first son is at the head of it. For eleven days nobody brought that up with me.

The Wednesday of that week Mensah called me at work. He said his vehicles require the chapel carriage for insurance. It takes a man at each corner, and the man at the head walks it with his hand on the rail. He said the rail sits at thirty-one inches. Then he asked me about the consulate appointment and got off the phone.

Thirty-one inches is about where my hand is.

So on the Friday my hand was on that rail from the chapel doors out to the hearse. My uncle Chuka was on the back left and he started to say something in the parking lot and Mensah told him it was a state requirement.

That same night one of the husbands grabbed my push handles to get me over the lip at the hall door and I let him, because my mother was watching and it was her night.

I drove myself everywhere in there. The van's a Pacifica with the floor cut out and hand controls, and it's paid off.

The body flew out on the twenty-sixth. You're at cargo by four for a flight that leaves at nine, and the whole thing is a scale and a man who wants the paperwork in one particular order. We were done at six. He followed me back to Cartwright because the consulate copies needed his stamp and I wanted the originals in my hand before I got on a plane.

He locked the front. There's an office in the back with a kettle in it and the shelf where the caskets sit, and it happened in there. He asked me first and then he asked me again. He took his glasses off and set them on the desk on top of the folder.

Eleven minutes, maybe twelve. I was thirty-three. I drove home and my mother was up and I told her the stamping ran longer than they said.

I flew out on the fourth of March and the burial was the seventh. The ground at the compound is red and it isn't ground for a chair, so four of my cousins carried me and the chair both up from the road. There's a photograph of me at the graveside with dust past the hubs. Somebody got the live band anyway and it came out of the aso ebi money.

I got back on the fourteenth. Middle of that month I put three sentences on their Google page. Five stars. I said the hearse was on time and that the paperwork was right the first time.

He replied under it. Thank you for trusting us with your father. I scrolled.

June the seventeenth, a Tuesday. My cousin Ifeanyi's wife lost her father and he came by the house, and my mother had the good cups out at the table with him and jollof warming on the stove.

He asked who we used. My mother said it before I could. The Ghana man on Cartwright, she said. He was good to us.

I keep everything from February in an accordion folder in the office closet, under F. The card's in there. The office number is printed on the front. His cell is on the back in blue pen and it's a different number.

I read Ifeanyi the one off the front and he put it in his phone while I was still holding the card. Then I put the card back in the folder.