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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