“I don’t know a thing,” she’d say, “I’ve been away at college.” But she listened to
their sad stories: facing a layoff; daughter needed a tooth pulled; junk car broke
down, missed some work. Sorry, they’d say, little short right now. Some were
surely lying, taking advantage of the situation, but she felt equally sure some
troubles were genuine. So she counted what cash they brought her and filled in
a triplicate receipt. She wasn’t used to the heat anymore, and her sweaty hands
curled the paper, smeared the ink. After they’d gone she penciled the amounts
paid on a ledger sheet—rental addresses across one axis, months of the year
down the other—and left herself notes in the margin about the arrangements.
Evenings, she shoveled sawdust on the puddles of antifreeze and oil, like her
father had done when Neda was a girl.
*
88
The last time they spoke on the phone, her father said he was leaving for a two-
week vacation in Ireland to sightsee and meet distant cousins. He read a passage
from the guidebook he’d ordered through Amazon. Neither of these things,
Ireland nor the Internet, had ever been discussed before.
“Where’s this coming from?” she asked.
“No houses sitting vacant. You’re staying at college this summer and I just found
out I’ve got cousins. Why not?”
A few days later he took an early morning flight out of Fresno to San Francisco
where he boarded his international flight. Sometime she imagined him there,
towing his new suitcase, craning his neck at the model planes on the ceiling,
buying coffee from a Starbucks kiosk—Starbucks: that’s another surprise—then
shuffling in line with his boarding pass, maybe practicing his Irish on the gate
agent. Moments after takeoff his plane caught fire and crashed into the waters of
the bay.
Neda drove to the site. She watched the news reports on the motel television
and waited. Eventually she was allowed into a hangar where investigators were
sorting through debris recovered from the water. An investigator asked Neda
questions about her father: Who was he travelling with? What identifiable things