Five Hours a Year novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Funeral Invoice
Alec bills Leah for her father's funeral and leaves before the burial; she declines the invoice and calls Frances.
My husband billed me for my father's funeral.
The statement came to my phone at 12:10, while the pallbearers were still carrying the casket down the church steps.
It charged an hour and a half of funeral attendance at $3,000 an hour, so $4,500 in all.
Under it were two buttons, one to approve and one to decline.
My husband was one of the best-paid litigators in the country.
In six years of marriage, I got five free hours of him each year.
Everything past that went on a monthly invoice.
He charged forty minutes for dinner out and two hours for meeting my parents.
In bed, he gave me twenty minutes, counted from the first kiss.
I used to tell myself that was just how a man like that stayed sharp.
I stood at the top of the church steps in my black dress and watched him walk toward the rental car.
He had come in from New York that morning.
He had sat beside me for the whole service, holding my hand, and I had been so grateful I hadn't once looked at his watch.
Now he had stopped at the curb and was looking at it.
"Alec."
He turned. "Leah, I'm at ninety minutes."
"They haven't buried him yet."
"I know. I'm sorry." He said it gently, which was worse. "I have the Brandt closing at four. Desmond has been texting me since the first hymn."
His phone buzzed in his hand as he said it.
He glanced down, and then at me.
"Send me the invoice for the burial too. I'll waive the travel."
My mother was standing two steps below me with her hand on the rail.
My cousins had gone quiet at the bottom of the steps.
Nobody said a word. Everybody had heard him.
"That is my father in that casket," I said. "He taught you to fish."
"He did, and I'm grateful." Alec checked the time again. "Leah, I really have to go."
He bent to kiss my cheek, and I let him, because I was too tired to turn away.
Then he got in the car and drove off down Water Street.
He did not look back at the church.
I looked down at my phone.
For six years, I had pressed Approve on the first of every month.
The money came out of the household account and went into something called LT Holdings.
Alec said it was a tax arrangement.
I had never once asked to see it.
I pressed Decline.
It was the first time I had ever done it, and the screen asked me whether I was sure.
I was.
"Leah, honey." A hand touched my elbow.
It was Frances Basinger, who had been my father's closest friend since law school and flown in from San Francisco the night before.
She was sixty-one and wore her gray hair cut short, and she had held my mother, Donna, up through the entire service.
"Your father told me you were the best trial lawyer Ohio ever lost," she said. "He said you gave it up for a man with a stopwatch."
"I didn't give it up," I said. "I paused it."
"For six years."
I didn't answer.
She took a card out of her coat and pressed it into my palm.
"I have a desk in San Francisco with your name on it, and a pay rate that has nothing to do with whose wife you are. It's yours whenever you want it."
My phone buzzed again.
This time it was a text from Desmond Marr, Alec's senior partner, who had sent the biggest wreath in the church.
Leah, I'm so sorry about your dad. Alec's a good man who is bad at this. Give him till Monday and don't do anything rash. I'll talk to him myself.
It was kind and it was smooth.
It was also the third person that day to tell me to wait.
I put the phone in my pocket.
Then I walked down the steps and took my mother's arm.
"Mom, I'm going to the cemetery," I said. "Alec isn't coming."
"I know, sweetheart."
"And I'm not going back to New York."
She looked at me for a long time.
"Good," my mother said.
So I buried my father with no clock running.
When the last of the dirt was laid, I took out Frances's card and called the number on it.
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