Saturday

Today, Saturday, Carol and Aisha will drive to Irvine and collect Donnie’s cremated remains. It is early morning. Carol knocks on her daughter’s door to wake her but she is already up and dressed, hooded in her brother’s cardinal red sweatshirt despite the building heat and wearing her home-cut jean shorts and flip-flops. She is listening to her iPod and sitting with legs splayed on the carpet gluing fake jewels on her freshly painted toes. During the school year Aisha is not allowed to paint her nails. It’s how Carol, the youngest in a family of girls, was raised. But with just a week left before summer break the assistant principal had called to let Carol know that Aisha would be passed to the next grade.

Standing at the door Carol notes that she and her daughter do not share body types. Or that they are beginning to differentiate in this way. Though exaggerated because Aisha’s legs are pressed against the carpet, Aisha is much heavier in the thighs, even at fourteen. Carol knocks again on the door and Aisha looks up from her nails and holds up two fingers to suggest a time for her mother to wait.

It is the first time they have been in the car, or out of the apartment, since Tuesday. Since Carol’s son had killed a neighborhood boy in what most of the local press is calling an accident and then hung himself in her garage. On Wednesday, Aisha had had the company of her best friend Caitlyn until the girls were delivered a cum-spattered pizza and Caitlyn’s brother, home from college, was sent to collect her.

Carol’s older model silver Honda Civic is parked at the mouth of the driveway, away from the garage, and is thickly covered in the purple stain of the flowers from the overhanging jacaranda. There are no news trucks waiting at the curb blocking the driveway as there had been on the previous days. Yesterday there had been only one, Local Channel 49. Carol had watched on and off for six hours through the blinds of the front window as an anchorwoman in the back of the truck continually primped in a handheld mirror waiting for someone to come out of the upper unit of the duplex on 78^th Street in Westchester, the only rental property on the street. She interviewed neighbors as they left and came home from work, interviewed their children. Almost all pointed to Carol’s garage and then to Carol’s front door. The anchorwoman came up the steps and knocked on two occasions.

They arrive at the Patel and Sons mortuary and Carol instructs her daughter to stay in the car. The sun is high and the car will soon start to bake but Carol does not suggest her daughter open a window. When her mother is a few steps away, Aisha leans across the driver’s seat to tap her knuckles on the window. Carol turns and Aisha makes a gesture for the keys.

She takes the headphones out of her ears and turns the radio to a pop station, takes off her hood and rests her tightly braided head on the glass and stares in the direction of the sign above the one one-storey dark brown building.

Inside the mortuary Carol walks all the way to the counter before an Indian man wearing a tight-fitting embroidered short-sleeved shirt removes his reading glasses and looks up from his papers.

“How may I help you?”

She gives her name, but it does not register an immediate response.

“Donald Crawford is my son,” she says. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes.”

He rings a finger-bell that is fastened to the counter.

He taps his pen as he is waiting for someone to emerge from the back office. Carol can see a head moving beyond the saloon-style doors. She looks back to the man with papers spread before him, his thin black chest hairs escape his shirt that has been poorly laundered—strings hang from the embroidery and there is...