“I used to go shopping with her after school and race around the clothing racks. She would say, ‘Yuki-eh, you must learn to be a lady.’

“I don’t think I ever quite learned to do that.” Yuki laughed. “I liked my music loud. My skirts short—I know, Mommy, even this one is too short! She wanted me to marry a lawyer—instead I became one.

“My life isn’t what she dreamed for me, but she always gave me her love, her support . . . her everything.

“We were a team, Mom and me. Best friends, always. As I stand here with my uncle, I cannot imagine my world without her. Mommy, I will love you and miss you forever.”

Yuki lowered her head, her lips trembling. Then she and her uncle turned so that they faced Keiko’s coffin.

Pressing a bracelet of stone beads between her palms, Yuki held her hands in front of her face. She and her uncle Jack chanted a Japanese prayer that swelled as the voices of Keiko’s friends and family joined in.

Then Yuki bowed to her mother’s coffin.

I gripped Claire’s hand with my right hand, Cindy’s hand with my left, feeling my own grief well up in me as tears rolled down Yuki’s face.

“This is just the saddest damn day,” Claire said.

Chapter 42

I FOUND MY MOTHER’S GRAVE by walking east and south for ten minutes with a map in my hand, stepping around carved lions and angels, and ornate mausoleums, until I found the simple granite stone that I carried around like a weight in my heart.

The carved letters had darkened with almost fifteen years’ growth of lichen, but the legend was clear and indelible. Helen Boxer, wife of Martin, devoted mother to Lindsay and Catherine. 1939-1989.

A picture came to me of being a little kid, Mom making breakfast as she got ready for work, her yellow hair pinned up in a twist, pulling hot Pop-Tarts out of the toaster for me and Cat, burning her fingers and crying out “oooh-oooh-ooooh” to make us laugh.

On those days, workdays, I wouldn’t see her again until dark.

I remembered how my little sister and I would come home from school to an empty house. Me, making the mac-and-cheese dinners. Waking up at night to our mom screaming at Dad to shut his trap and let the girls sleep.

And I remember what it was like after my father left us: my mother’s beautiful, short-lived freedom from my father’s iron fist over all of us. She cut her hair into a flingy bob. Took singing lessons with Marci Weinstein, who lived down the street. Had six or seven years of what she called “breathing free”—before runaway breast cancer knocked her down.

I had a dim memory of standing at this very spot when Mom was buried, not having a shred of the grace or eloquence Yuki had shown today. I was mute, torn up with anger, bent on keeping my face turned so that I didn’t have to look at my father.