Ray Mercer worked at Henderson's Funeral Home in a town called Millerton, Ohio, population 29,847 and dropping.

The funeral home was on Main Street between a shuttered Walgreens and a dentist's office that had closed in 2014 and would not reopen. The building was brick, two stories, painted a colour that used to be white and was now the colour of old teeth. There was a sign out front that said HENDERSON'S in letters that had been repainted so many times they were raised like scars.

Ray worked on the second floor. His job was to prepare the dead—wash them, dress them, put them in the boxes. He was not good at it. He was better at it than nobody, which was why Bob Henderson kept him around despite the fact that Ray messed up more often than he got things right.

Bob was fifty-five, fat, and the kind of boss who measured respect in gestures. Did you knock on his door before entering? Did you call him Mr. Henderson or just Bob? Did you bow?

Ray did not bow.

Not to Bob. Not to the cops who came in to check things. Not to the families who paid the bills. Ray did not bow because bowing was not something Ray did. Nobody had taught him not to bow. Nobody had taught him anything, really. His father had died when Ray was six and his mother had worked double shifts at the plant until her back gave out, and after that Ray had learned everything from other kids who had also been taught nothing.

"Mercer," Bob said one Tuesday, standing in the doorway of the preparation room with his arms crossed. "We talked about this."

Ray did not look up from the coffin he was working on. The dead man inside was sixty-three, heart attack, and looked mostly asleep except for the part where he was dead. Ray was trying to make him look mostly asleep without making him look too much like anything.

"Talked about what?"

"The respect thing. You walk into my office, you acknowledge your employer. That is basic. That is basic decency."

Ray closed the coffin lid. "I acknowledge you by showing up to work."

Bob's face went red. It went red often. It was a feature, not a bug. "You think showing up is enough? You think because you drag your ass in here every day you do not have to do the basic things?"

"I think my work speaks for itself."

"Your work speaks like garbage, that is what it speaks like." Bob stepped closer. "You know I could fire you. I could fire you this second and go find somebody who knows how to behave."

Ray looked at him. He had seen Bob threaten this before. It never happened. There was nobody else in Millerton who would do this work, and the people from the next town over charged more and took two days instead of one.

"Go ahead," Ray said.

Bob stood there for a moment, breathing hard, his face the colour of a stop sign. Then he turned and walked out.

Ray looked back at the coffin. The dead man looked mostly asleep. That was good enough.

Maria Gonzalez came in on Thursday.

She was thirty-eight, Mexican, with two kids—a boy of ten and a girl of seven—and she was wearing the kind of tired that sleep does not fix. Her father had died three days ago in a hospital in Dayton, and she had driven two hours to get him back to Millerton because her father had been born in Millerton and wanted to die in Millerton and if anyone argued with that, they could take the body somewhere else.

"I need to make arrangements," she said.

Ray was behind the desk. Bob was in his office with the door closed, which was his way of saying he was available but only on his terms.

"What kind of arrangements?"

"A box. A service. Something." She set a folder on the desk. It was thin. Ray could see through it. "That is all I have."

Ray looked at the folder. He looked at Maria. He looked at the line on her face that ran from her nose to the corner of her mouth, the kind of line that comes from years of not smiling so much as tolerating.

"I will need to see the death certificate," he said.

"It is in the folder."

"The folder has a hospital bill and a discharge summary. No death certificate."

Maria closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were bright but dry. She did not cry. Maria Gonzalez did not cry in funeral homes. "I will get it. Can you hold the arrangements for twenty-four hours?"

"I can hold them for as long as you can pay for them."

She nodded. She did not argue. She picked up the thin folder and turned to go, and at the door she stopped.

"My father—his name was Carlos. He was a good man. He worked at the steel plant for thirty years. He came to this country with nothing and he never asked anybody for anything. He did not even ask for a raise."

Ray nodded. "I will make sure he looks decent."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she left.

Ray spent the afternoon on Carlos Gonzalez. He washed him and dressed him in the best suit he could find—which was grey and slightly too big—and put him in the middle-tier box, which was the kind of box that looked okay from the front and okay from the sides but if you walked around to the back you could see the seams.

Ray knew about seams. He lived with seams.

On Friday, he put three dollars in the drawer.

It was not much. It was three one-dollar bills, folded and slipped into the crack between the second and third drawer in the cash box. The money had been in his coat pocket, where it had been since Wednesday, and he did not remember putting it there or why it had been there. He found it when he was locking up for the night, and when he found it, he put it in the drawer without thinking about it.

He did this every month or so. Three dollars. Sometimes five. Always from his pocket, always in the crack between drawers. He did not tell Bob. He did not tell anybody.

Bob found it on a Monday.

The cash box was short. Ray knew this because Bob's face told him, and Bob's face was a reliable indicator of financial discrepancies the way a barometer is a reliable indicator of rain.

"Mercer," Bob said. "My office. Now."

Ray followed him down the hall. Bob's office was small and smelled of Old Spice and fried food. There were framed certificates on the wall and a picture of Bob with the mayor, which Bob had pointed out to Ray three times.

"Where is the money?" Bob asked. He did not sit down. He never sat down when he was mad. He paced.

"What money?"

"The cash box is short forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars, Mercer. That is not a mistake. That is not 'somebody dropped a quarter under the desk.' That is forty-two dollars that was supposed to be in the box and is not."

Ray thought about the three dollars he had put in the drawer. He thought about the five dollars from the month before. He thought about the one time, six months ago, when he had found twelve dollars in an old coat he was preparing and put it in the drawer and told himself it was nobody's money anymore.

"I do not know where the money went."

Bob leaned on his desk. "Do not play stupid with me. I have been doing this twenty years. I know when somebody is stealing from me."

"I am not stealing from you."

"Then explain the missing money."

Ray looked at him. "I do not have an explanation."

Bob straightened up. "You are suspended. Effective immediately. Do not come back until I tell you to come back."

Ray went home. He sat in his apartment—the second floor of a duplex that belonged to his sister, who was two hours away and had not asked him to live there out of love—and he stared at the wall.

The wall was beige. It had been beige when he moved in and it was still beige. Some things never changed in Millerton. The wall was beige. The plant was still closed. The young people still left. And Ray was still forty-two and divorced and had a bad back and did not bow to anybody.

He did not go back to work for three days.

On the fourth day, Officer Kowalski came to the funeral home.

Kowalski was forty, Polish, and the kind of cop who enjoyed his badge the way some people enjoyed their sports teams: with an unexamined loyalty that made him defensive about things that had nothing to do with him.

"Where is Mercer?" he asked Bob, who was back at his desk eating a sandwich.

" Suspended. Do not know when he is coming back."

Kowalski frowned. "I need to talk to him."

"Talk to him somewhere else. I don't need him hanging around."

Kowalski found Ray at his sister's place. He knocked on the door in a way that was not really a knock—it was more of a battering ram with a knuckle. Ray opened the door.

"Mr. Mercer," Kowalski said. He did not introduce himself. He did not need to. "I am Officer Kowalski with the Millerton police. I need to ask you some questions."

Ray looked at him. "About what?"

"About the dead people."

That was not what Ray had expected. "What about them?"

Kowalski stepped past him into the apartment without waiting for an invitation. He looked around—the beige wall, the television with one working channel, the kitchen table with three unpaid bills on it.

"Three bodies," Kowalski said. "In the last month. Prepared by you. And in each one, something was found."

"What sort of something?"

Kowalski reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. Inside was a coin—a quarter, old and worn, with the face of Franklin. "In the first body's pocket. In the second body's shoe. In the third body's hand. A quarter each time. Old quarters. Not in circulation."

Ray looked at the bag. "That is interesting."

"Is it? Because I talked to the families. None of them put those quarters there. None of them remember seeing those quarters before the preparation. And you are the one who prepared them."

"I did not put quarters in any of them."

"Then who did?"

Ray thought about the drawer. The crack between the second and third drawer in the cash box. The three dollars. The five dollars. The twelve dollars. The quarters, maybe. He had never counted. He had never looked closely. He had just known that some mornings there was money in the drawer that had not been there the night before, and he had taken it and put it where it needed to go.

"I do not know," he said.

Kowalski looked at him for a long time. "You know, Mr. Mercer, there are people in this town who think you are strange. A man who shows up to work but never shows respect. Never bows to the boss. Never nods to the cop. Never bends for anyone. People notice."

"I do not bow because that is not what I do."

"Right. That is not what you do. But you know what else is not what you do? Stealing from dead people."

"I am not stealing from dead people."

"Then explain the quarters."

Ray did not have an answer. He stood in his beige apartment and did not have an answer, and Kowalski watched him not have it, and the silence between them was the kind of silence that leads to things you cannot take back.

"I will be back," Kowalski said. "And next time, I would like to have answers."

He left. Ray closed the door. He sat down on the couch. He looked at the beige wall.

That evening, Maria Gonzalez came to the door.

She had her two kids with her—the boy holding a paper bag and the girl holding her hand. The paper bag contained a plate covered in tin foil.

"My abuela made tamales," the boy said.

Maria looked at Ray. "You cannot pay me. So do not make it strange."

Ray took the plate. It was warm. "Thank you."

"Carlos—my father—he liked you. He said you were a good man, even if you were quiet. He said you treated him right."

"He was a good man."

"Yes." She paused. "About the quarters—my father, when I picked him up from the hospital, he had a quarter in his wallet. I put it there. It was the last quarter in my pocket. I thought he should have something when he went."

Ray looked at her. "You put a quarter in his pocket?"

"He was poor all his life. I thought he should have one last quarter." She smiled, and it was not a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who knew the world was absurd and had decided to participate anyway anyway anyway. "Maybe that is where the quarters come from."

Ray did not know. He did not know if Maria's quarter was the same quarter that was in the plastic bag in Officer Kowalski's office. He did not know if any of it had a logical explanation.

He closed the door and stood in his beige apartment and held the plate of tamales and thought about quarters and drawers and the strange, unexplained accumulation of small metal objects in a town that had forgotten how to explain anything.

He was suspended for two weeks. Bob called him back because there was nobody else, and when Ray returned to work, Bob looked at him in a way that had not existed before—a way that was not quite hostility and not quite fear and not quite anything Ray could name.

Ray did not bow. He did not nod. He simply went to the preparation room and began working on the dead, and the coins continued to appear in the drawer, and he continued to take them and put them back, and nobody explained anything to anybody, and the town of Millerton, population 29,814 and dropping, continued to do what it had always done: exist, quietly and without fanfare, until it did not.