of still-hot ashes, dotted here and there with small charred bones, the perfect white kernels of teeth. Frank had started the ritual passing of bones, picking the larger fragments out with a pair of special chopsticks, passing them chopstick-to-chopstick to Rose, who passed them to Lois—spirit to body to dust. Once, years before in a restaurant, Rose had violently slapped the chopsticks out of Jackie’s hand when she’d used them to offer a piece of fish to her father. She never explained why, and when the connection finally hit Jackie, at Mary Sakai’s cremation, it was that more than the handling of her grandmother’s bones that made her hug herself and rock back and forth. This time, though, there had been no picking through the remains; her mother hadn’t wanted it, and Jackie was glad. She sat silently, staring at the wall as if she could see through it, and imagined the glasses melting, the gold wedding band, flames consuming flesh. Her eyes had settled on the odd old man across from her who’d sat through the entire service mumbling to himself, and then, when she and Lois approached him after it was over, had jumped to his feet instantly, spry as a spaniel, and offered a gorgeous, right-angled salute. She’d looked over at Burt Hara, the Buddhist priest from the Tara Estates who Frank sometimes played cards with; he’d just given Lois a thick wooden tablet with Chinese characters, the Buddhist name conferred to Frank upon his death. When the black-tied employee came out and handed Rose a simple bronze urn, Jackie wondered only what had happened to the bones and teeth. Rose handed the urn to Lois, who wrapped it in a purple furoshiki and set it down on the table. Burt Hara stood over it and said a few words in Japanese. And then everyone there, even, shockingly, both of Jackie’s parents, began to cry in earnest—everyone, that is, except for Jackie. The odd saluting man exploded with great gulping sobs; her mother just covered her face. She felt awful then—for not feeling more; for not sharing in their sorrow; for having been so distant from Frank, by the end, that she couldn’t even properly grieve.
But there was nothing, she thought, as she sat at his desk, that she could do about that failure. One tangible thing she could accomplish right now, however, was to grapple with America Online, and so she reached out and switched on the Mac. AOL, she knew, would keep billing her grandfather endlessly unless she canceled the account; her aunt was smart to want to cut them off now. She double-clicked on the AOL icon, double-clicked again. The dialogue box gave her the user’s screen name, “FSakai.” Now she needed the password. She paused for a moment. Baseball, his biggest love, was the obvious answer. She tried “Dodger,” then “Koufax,” then “Drysdale.” Who else had he admired? She tried “Dusty,” “Fernando,” and “homerun.” She thought about Japanese ballplayers—would he use a player from the Japanese leagues? She didn’t think so. Then she recalled a player that he’d mentioned as being half-Asian, whose name she remembered because she thought it so funny, and she typed “Darling” very quickly and hit “return.” The modem dialed, whirred, connected. Something flashed on and off the screen. She was in.
A tinny, cheerful voice welcomed her and informed her, “You’ve got mail!” She’d just intended to log on long enough to cancel his membership, but now she decided to read the new mail. It must have been written around the time he died, and she wondered who it was from. She felt vaguely invasive. Once, when she’d worked for an accountant in high school, she’d had to go through the checkbook of a woman who’d recently died. The barely dried ink there, the woman’s belief, in writing the checks, that she’d be around to cover them, had spooked and saddened her, as Frank’s mail did now. When she went to open it, though, she found that it was only something from the people at America Online. She was half-disappointed, half-relieved. Then, since she was there already, she decided to look at his file of outgoing mail. The results were boring—the most recent mail had all gone out to her. She felt another stab of guilt—she hadn’t answered his last few messages—so to counteract it, she did something worse. Curious about who her grandfather corresponded with, she opened up his address file—the only addresses there belonged to Jackie, Lois, Rose, and Ted. This couldn’t be, she thought; these were probably just the addresses he happened to keep on file. She closed that box and pulled up his older mail. The only messages were from her and her aunt and Ted. And there weren’t very many. Not, anyway, in comparison to the number of messages he’d sent to them—she opened his “sent mail” file again and saw that the list of outgoing messages was about four times as long. She couldn’t bear to look at this. She hadn’t returned his calls; had forgotten his last two birthdays; had only responded to a fraction of his emails. She hung her head for a moment and, looking back at the screen, finally began to sense the loneliness of the man who used to sit where she sat now.
Feeling something strong and definite for the first time since the funeral—shame—she thought that what her aunt wished her to do, while foolish, wasn’t really so hard. Maybe Frank had wanted all that money to go to the man in the will; who was she to say? Tracking him down was the least she could do—for everyone. And she could spend the day with her aunt, too, like Lois always wanted her to—she could blow off her schoolwork for once and go look at this house with them. Sighing, she turned off the computer and went back out to the living room, where Lois and Ted, red pens in hand, were circling more ads. The business card was still lying untouched on top of the box of money; Jackie picked it up and slipped it into her wallet.
“So I’ll give Loda Thomas a call on Monday,” she said, as nonchalantly as she could.
Lois smiled, and Jackie knew that she knew that something had happened in the bedroom. But she didn’t ask about it; she just said, “Thank you.”
SHE SAW him everywhere, at different ages, in different incarnations. It was like the soundless scenes played at the end of certain movies, flashing on and off the screen while the credits rolled. Today the scenes starred Jackie as tiny granddaughter, maybe because Lois had spent the whole day with her, like they used to with Frank twenty years ago, afternoons and outings and dinners at home that her niece didn’t even remember.
But Lois did. Small snippets of memory, like cut-up film. Frank handing out cigars when Jackie was born, laughing aloud and then suddenly weeping, as if he already knew she’d be his only grandchild. Frank stomping around the house in Gardena, roaring, pretending he was a monster, waggling his sawed-off foot or half-finger in Jackie’s face. Frank and Jackie in the bowling alley, he encouraging her as she squatted behind the heavy ball, pushed it with both hands, jumped up and down as she watched it roll right into the gutter. Frank and Jackie a couple of years later, leaning over the railing at the Redondo Beach Pier. She was riding on his shoulders, legs hooked over his chest, fingers trying to get a hold in his crew-cut hair. He with his sun-browned hands wrapped around each of her legs. Lois beside them getting nervous as Frank leaned over the railing to watch a fish flipping on someone’s hook, her niece draped over his head, hanging, tipping out over the water. Lois yelled, “Dad!” and then felt silly as he stood up straight, snapped the child back onto the pier, saying, “What?” And then they’d fished, the three of them, sitting in lawn chairs and holding the bamboo poles that Frank had made himself, nodding them up and down, back and forth, like divining rods. Jackie’s mother was in medical school then, her father already a doctor, so it often fell to Frank or Lois—who was slowly finishing college—to take care of Rose’s child. To try and show her something different from the gilded, tree-lined world they both knew she was going to grow up in.
Lois remembered the day her family had divided. Looking back, she could see that it had been happening for years, but one Saturday morning in 1963, each member of the family had fallen clearly in one direction or the other.
She was twelve years old, and her older sister was playing for the under-fifteen championship of the Japanese Tennis League. Lois—who was in charge of equipment—had accidentally grabbed Rose’s practice shoes before running out to the car; they looked the same as the ones her sister wore for matches. And
