LITMIR.BIZ

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Sakai in 3B—Frank’s daughter?”

      “Yes,” Jackie answered, holding her arm out the window. “I’m actually her niece. And his granddaughter.”

      “Aw, man,” the guard said, clutching the pass. “Mr. Frank…It’s just…See…Aw, man.”

      And as she watched him, her hand still extended to receive the blue pass, she saw that he was struggling not to cry. His name tag read “Tony,” and he was about twenty-five—Jackie’s age—but suddenly he looked like a child. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, are you all right?”

      He nodded, and then pulled himself together, finally giving Jackie her pass. “I’m sorry. I mean, you’re family. And Miss Sakai, too. I guess I have no right. But it was just a surprise is all, and Frank…” He trailed off.

      “It’s OK,” she reassured him again. “He had a good long life, you know? And we were all really lucky to have him.”

      Her words sounded empty and false to her, but they seemed to work for Tony. He nodded resolutely, gave his condolences, and then raised the gate so she could drive into the complex. And Jackie thought, not for the first time, that her ability to comfort people revealed a deficiency on her part, not a virtue. It is only those who aren’t totally shattered by a loss who can comfort the others, who are. Lois, who’d stopped a mugging the previous fall by telling the three young would-be thieves that they were shaming their families; who’d once pulled a dying child out from under the wheel of a bus and held him while his mother fainted, had completely fallen apart at the death of her father. She’d collapsed in on herself—she wouldn’t eat, would hardly talk, and she shivered no matter how warm it was. For the first time in her life, someone else—mostly Ted—had to watch after her and make sure she ate. All of this while Jackie made continual check-up phone calls, and while her mother Rose, Lois’s sister, took care of all the funeral logistics.

      Tony was right—her grandfather’s death had been completely unexpected. At seventy-one, he’d still been in seemingly perfect health—he walked every day, ate lightly and well, and did repair jobs all over the neighborhood. With his tight, lean body, handsome grin, and just-graying hair, he’d looked twenty years younger than he was. The day he died, he walked a mile to an old widow’s house to cut her overgrown front lawn. It was she who placed the call to 911 an hour later when she found him, laid flat out behind the idling mower.

      Jackie parked her Accord in a visitor’s spot, and then, sighing heavily, she walked up to her aunt’s apartment, the last place she’d seen her grandfather alive. They had been close once, when she was much younger and had needed watching because her parents were so busy—her father practicing medicine and teaching at Cedars-Sinai; her mother going to medical school and then vanishing completely into her internship and residency. He’d lived in Gardena then, with her grandmother and sometimes Lois too, and Jackie had spent whole weeks with them when her parents were especially swamped. But then Jackie had gotten older, and her softspoken grandfather had been no competition for the excitements of the social world at school. He’d tried to stay involved in her life, right up until the end—he’d sent her clippings about women lawyers; he’d called her twice a month and pretended not to notice how she rushed him off the phone; he’d even sent her frequent e-mails on the computer her parents had bought him. But more often than not, Jackie hadn’t answered, hadn’t thanked him, hadn’t noticed him much at all. By the time of his death she hardly knew him, and so her sense of loss now seemed shallow and unearned.

      When Lois answered the door, she had the phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, and she was shaking out a section of the newspaper. She beckoned for Jackie to enter, which Jackie did, taking a seat on the couch. Lois held the paper in one hand now, and gestured as if whomever she was speaking to were standing right in front of her.

      “You’re being silly, Cal,” she said. “If someone tells you she’s prepared to spend a whole lot of money, it’s not in your best interest to try and stop her.” She paced silently for a moment, listening. Then, “Listen, don’t mess with me. My dad just died, my cat has hyper-thyroid, and one of my students just got arrested for robbing a bank. If one more bad thing happens, I’m likely to snap. I’m a woman with nothing to lose.”

      Jackie was glad to hear her talk like this, even if her aunt’s firm words were undercut by the fact that she was still in her blue plaid pajamas. Jackie had been worried about Lois these last ten days. Her aunt, a strong, brash, stout, stone lion of a woman, had been unusually subdued since Frank died. For the first time in years, she’d even taken time off from her job as head guidance counselor at Culver City High School. She’d lost weight, had to be forced to come to the phone, had been dazed and barely audible when she managed to speak at all. This return to her usual attitudinal self suggested that she was starting to recover.

      “All right, then. Three o’clock.” She hung up the phone. “Ted?” she called out in the direction of the kitchen. “We’ve got a date. Cal said three o’clock.”

      A vague sound of acknowledgment came from the kitchen. Ted was doing the dishes—Jackie heard the clinks of silver against stoneware, smelled the ghosts of burned eggs and onions—and she was sure he wasn’t happy about it. “What’s happening?” she asked, when her aunt turned toward her.

      “We’re getting out of here,” Lois said. She pulled a cigarette out of a half-empty pack and lit it; she’d started smoking on the day of the funeral. “Ted and I are finally going to buy a house.”

      Watching her aunt cough a few times, lower the cigarette, and then take another pained drag, Jackie thought that maybe she wasn’t improving after all. “A house?” she repeated, and then she noticed what her aunt had been holding—the real estate section, spotted with circles of red ink, question marks in blue, indecipherable notes in dark green. Lois had put the paper down on the coffee table and now her cat, Winston, jumped on top of it, circling and batting at the billowing corners.

      “It’s actually a great time to buy,” Lois informed her, sitting in the armchair that was opposite the couch. “Prices have been plummeting because of the quake.”

      Jackie nodded. Not quite a month before, the Northridge earthquake had struck the city, destroying or damaging thousands of buildings, killing fifty-seven people, and terrifying everyone. Since then the aftershocks had been appearing like unwelcome guests, brazenly and when you least expected them. Frank, Lois told her later, had been oddly unperturbed by the quake, by the frequent aftershocks, as if he knew he wouldn’t be taken by that catastrophe, but by one of a more personal variety. But Jackie wondered now if the heart attack hadn’t been some delayed reaction to the trauma of the quake. The week before he died—just after the buildings on campus had been declared safe and classes had started up again—she’d come home to find her floor soaked, her carp wide-eyed and lifeless at the bottom of the empty aquarium. The tank’s corner seam had been weakened by the quake; had finally given nine days after it. Maybe some seam in Frank’s heart had been weakened as well, some internal fault line which waited two weeks, until the panic had lessened, to write its own smaller disaster.

      “But isn’t it kind of soon?” Jackie asked. She didn’t press her on the rest of what she wondered, which was why they were doing this now. For six years, Lois, Ted, and her grandfather had lived in this small, cramped apartment, in this increasingly dangerous complex. It had never seemed strange that Frank had stayed here—when her grandmother died, it was a given that her grandfather would move in with Lois and not with Rose, even though the Ishidas had a huge place up in Ojai now, a four-bedroom house on a lovely five-acre lot. Lois was closer to Frank, always had been, and Rose had been closer to their mother. Now, with Frank gone, she and Ted would have more space—yet Jackie understood immediately why they had to leave. It was strange and awful to sit in this apartment, even for just a few minutes. She kept expecting her grandfather to enter the room, grinning when he saw her.

      “I’ve just got to get out of here,” Lois said, crushing out, to Jackie’s relief, her half-smoked cigarette. Then suddenly Jackie was afraid that Lois, too, would leave her, move someplace where they couldn’t see each other regularly. Her parents’ departure she hadn’t minded—they’d

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