Without a word, Jennifer stepped inside. The temperature felt adequate at somewhere near freezing. Now that Jennifer was actually in her grandmother’s presence, she wasn’t so confident she actually wanted to look at her. Despite the suggestion to the contrary, Jennifer, the medical student, had never gotten accustomed to looking at dead bodies, even after she had the chance to spend a week observing in a morgue in middle school. She glanced back at the case manager, who caught Jennifer’s eyes and wrinkled her brow as if to say, Well? Are you going to look or what?

Realizing she could not delay any longer, Jennifer grabbed the edge of the sheet and, fighting back tears, pulled the cloth up to expose her grandmother’s face. At first the shock was that she looked so normal. She appeared to be the warm, generous, white-haired grandmother and the always-sympathetic and in-your-corner-no-matter-what stalwart that Jennifer had known. But then when Jennifer looked more closely, it wasn’t fluorescent light that made her skin and lips the color of alabaster except along the side of her neck where there was dark purple lividity. Her color was truly a lifeless, translucent, blotchy, peachlike tan, and she was without a doubt dead.

In keeping with her fragile emotions, Jennifer’s sadness switched back to anger. She let the sheet drop and looked back at Kashmira Varini, and the woman’s false sympathy irritated her further. Jennifer walked out of the cooler and watched Kashmira struggle to close the heavy door. Jennifer didn’t offer to help.

“There!” Kashmira said, standing up straight and wiping her hands after the door had clicked shut. “You can see why you need to come to a decision for your loved one. She can’t stay here any longer.”

“Is there a death certificate?” Jennifer asked, seemingly out of the blue but more because Mr. Benfatti’s fate suddenly reoccurred to her.

“Most definitely. There would have to be a death certificate if either cremation or embalming were being considered. The death certificate was signed by Mrs. Maria Hernandez’s primary surgeon.”

“And the cause of death was definitely a heart attack?”

“It was!”

“What caused the heart attack?”

For several seconds, Kashmira stared back at Jennifer. Jennifer couldn’t tell if the woman was shocked, irritated, or simply frustrated by Jennifer’s question or by what might appear to her as Jennifer’s foot-dragging regarding the body deposition.

“I don’t know what caused your grandmother’s heart attack. I’m not a doctor.”