People were unexpectedly generous to the family in the week following Mr. Park’s funeral. Even Kate Ireland, the solitary, vaguely Asiatic brunette across the street came over with a bag of decaf beans from Starbucks and a Hallmark look of sorrow. Kate’s mother would have done a lot more, but coming from Kate, the Parks knew this was plenty. In the early days, when Mr. and Mrs. Park were still new to the area, Kate never even waved hello.

In all their years as neighbors, the Park girls hadn’t had any contact with her, always telling each other that she was the kind of person they would hate to grow up into—mousy, friendless, repressed. Kate’s mother, on the other hand, had been an exuberant, retired white lady right out of the Lifetime channel, bringing by star-shaped cookies around Christmas; sadly, she had moved away. The girls liked Kate’s German shepherd all right, when it was still alive and would wag its tail from behind the window. But why have a dog if all you did was lock it indoors like a cat?

Mrs. Park insisted she was responsible for Kate’s new neighborliness. A few days after the German shepherd’s death, Kate had gone into some kind of trance while watering her geraniums. She hadn’t noticed as water gushed down the sidewalk. It was Mrs. Park who ran over, turned the hose off, sat the woman down on her own front step and let her sob for ten minutes. It was then that Mrs. Park finally learned the dead dog’s name: Bluto.

“Death bring living people together,” Mrs. Park said to her girls. “Even though dog dying not as bad as people dying.”

Somebody sent the grieving family a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They couldn’t figure out who it was until they scrutinized the packing slip in the Amazon box and found a greeting from Mira’s cello teacher: “I’m Sorry.”

Church volunteers returned all the personal effects from Mr. Park’s office, and Mrs. Park told them that neither she nor her girls would show their faces at All-Friends again. Going back there would only remind her of her husband’s lack of peace with God even as he pretended to serve Him. How could she look any one of the parishioners in the eye? Her husband had betrayed all of them by simply giving up.

There was one saving grace. His body was not interred at All-Friends, which didn’t have the right building codes, but in the mausoleum beneath the biggest Korean church in Orange County, fifty miles away. This meant she had an excuse not to visit as often as a widow should.