“I remember that very clearly,” he says. “I was in California. It was 1984—the summer or spring of 1984 and it was very hot. Marvin Gaye was killed by his father and his father was a reverend, wasn’t he? I think he was. A man of the church and he shot his son in the head over something—over something to do with women, I think. Something about a woman, wasn’t it?” He turns to my sister, who doesn’t realize he’s asking her a direct question and just continues on with her head down in her book, working hard on her homework. “Wasn’t it something to do with a woman?” he says to her again. My sister finally looks up at him and sees that he’s talking to her. She stares at him but you can see she’s thinking about some math problem.

“I don’t know, Dad,” she says, and her eyes go back down into her books. He looks at me, sort of searching for a second. I don’t know the answer. How am I supposed to know the answer? I wasn’t even born yet when that happened. He looks out across the kitchen again, toward the dark windows.

“Huh, it’s funny I’d remember that,” he says and then he tosses the sponge into the sink and walks out onto the screen porch and stands there for a long while looking out at the lawn and the maple tree. Spring peepers are chirping from the pond down the hill. I pick up the Ziploc bag with the piece of the Berlin Wall inside and hold it up to the light. It’s just a chunk of concrete.

“Don’t lose that,” my sister says without looking up.

“How can I lose it?” I say. “It’s labeled.”

Blinking Eye

BLINKING EYE

She’s the youngest daughter of the woman whose ashes rest on the seat beside her in a dark green ceramic urn. She feels good about being the youngest and the one with sole responsibility for driving her mother’s remains clear across the country in time for the family funeral in Green Bay. She’s glad she finally has this time alone with her mother and she speaks to the tall green urn, as she barrels across Utah, in a voice exactly like the one she used when her mother was living. She speaks out loud while her bright eyes scan the enormous white sea of salt.