With an effort, I smothered a twinge of resentment and focused on what she was saying. “Problem?” I asked.

She handed over a message printed on ivory-colored letterhead. “Please accept our condolences . . . However . . . Perhaps Mr. Chen attended a school with a similar name?”

“Must be a computer glitch,” I said.

“And one more thing to take care of.” The left corner of Mom’s mouth twitched in a way it never had when Dad was alive.

A month earlier, in the days immediately after he died—no, not died, was killed by a hit-and-run driver—Mom had seemed so strong, moving from task to task. She’d notified old friends and dealt with police and lawyers.

But then she’d begun losing focus, becoming less and less able to separate the things that mattered from those that didn’t. Fretting over small stuff and not remembering what was big.

Like my internship in the Herald’s newsroom. She’d even forgotten that, when it was the last thing Dad and I had planned together. I could understand, sort of. A summer job probably wasn’t very important, considered against all the other changes in our lives. But still . . .

“As though I don’t know perfectly well what prep school my husband attended.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “If you want, I’ll call next week and straighten things out.”

“Things shouldn’t need straightening out,” she said. “They shouldn’t have written as though one of their own students was some unknown person.” Her face was drawn tight, its fine creases like the crackled lines of a glazed plate on the verge of breaking.

Dad would have known how to make her feel better. He always had known how to fix whatever needed fixing, whether it was a leaky faucet or a sad heart. But Dad couldn’t make this trouble right, because his being gone was the trouble, for Mom and me both.

And we didn’t have anyone else to help us, either. No family except for Mom’s parents, scientists doing research half a world away. No close friends, because we hadn’t lived in Seattle long enough to make any. Bett and Aimee, the girls I knew best, had left for summer places as soon as vacation started, and for Mom, the whole idea of allowing in anyone new was “Not yet, not now.”

On impulse I said, “Let’s skip the tuna sandwiches. We can go to a movie and out for pizza, after. Please?”