Before darting to the truck, he peeks around the doorframe to check for the billboard woman. Across the way, at the rim of the vending machine’s glow, the pug has mounted the Pomeranian. The boxer sniffs after their clumsy friction. Henry pulls the suit sleeve past his fingertips before lifting the iron off the gravel. When he tries wiping the iron clean on the dogmonger’s pants, the blood smears thinner but not off. Frantic, frustrated, he lobs it into the truck bed to sterilize, dismantle, and dispose of later, somewhere far, far away.

$8,722.04

Everything, everyone had a price, and so this was Papa’s. If this life insurance check amounted to the dollar-cent sum of nearly six decades of breathing, a solid four of which had been spent working, Henry didn’t even want to know the heartless arithmetic that would one day crunch out his own price tag.

Even though it was Saturday, his body clock had still dragged him out of bed by 5:30 a.m., no matter how badly he wanted to sink back into sleep. He was turning into Papa. Before climbing out of their cozy nest, he sealed the covers over Michelle, ran a palm over the bulge of her tummy.

Rather than flip on the TV for the day’s forecast, he watched the coffeepot fill drip by drip until it grumbled through its finale. Then, with the life insurance check clasped against a mug of black coffee, he toed the screen door open and took a seat on their singlewide’s wood-latticed steps. Dawn’s citrus matched the tart, sulphur smell of the gravel pits in the distance, the horizon line spliced by angling stalks of cranes and conveyor belts.

There’d been little time to grieve. Papa likely would have appreciated the bypassing of mourning rituals. The single-page, handwritten will, drawn up shortly after Mom had passed, simply named Henry sole executor, who could do with Papa’s assets and ashes as he saw fit.

What he picked up from the med school’s crematorium wasn’t an urn. Just a container. Plain, cylindrical, white, slightly bigger than a Folgers can and much heavier than it looked. When he gave it a shake to assess its contents, his papa, he heard a little thump from within. Chunks of bone, he was told. Its label, printed in a mechanical, matter-of-fact font, spelled out Papa’s name and three dates: birth, death, cremation. But before he could dig up the phone numbers of family members he’d only met once as a three-year-old visiting Manila, other phone calls started coming in.