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attention.”
    Just to get on my nerves, he played a very enthusiastic air guitar until the chorus was over. “Do you honestly think anyone’s going to bother you at the cemetery?”
    After yesterday, I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask me if there was a chance there might be reporters at the cemetery. Reporters came to my house. They showed up at the school. They wrote retrospectives about me. Why wouldn’t they show up there? If there was a story my mother wanted, she’d have had no problem crashing a funeral to get it.
    That was the job.
    As Miriam parked the car, I knew they could be waiting in the parking lot. Or on the sidewalk. Or near the mausoleum at the center of the cemetery. They could be photographing me right now.
    We walked down the path, and I kept my eyes open. I checked out the couple by the bridge and the woman with the stroller. I pointed out an old man and lady who looked at me a second too long. I asked Miriam, “Do they look familiar to you?”
    â€œNot really,” she said not-so-sympathetically. When I looked again, I knew she was right. I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me. They had their own problems. Their own dead person to visit. When I looked closer, I could see they were crying. Now I felt even worse.
    I never cried. Not for my parents. Not for myself. Not for anything.
    Lo thought this was abnormal. To get me to cry, she took me to therapists; we tried every kind of yoga there was, meditation, and even hypnosis—but nothing worked. One expert said, “If she could cry, she would feel better.” Another one blamed anxiety. “If you would take your medication, you might relax.” The last guy I saw told me that I was repressing my memories, maybe for a good reason.
    That made me laugh. “You think?”
    Dave Armstrong and his posse would say that I should pray for tears, that the absence of saltwater proved that I needed to get in touch with God. Of course, he would also say that my parents died for a reason—that tragedies like mine did not occur in a vacuum—and that we should trust in the Lord because bad things happened to good people every day. He probably believed they were happy in heaven, like it was some kind of party we all got to go to.
    On every anniversary, Dave Armstrong had a lot of things to say about how I should be feeling. He had a whole lot of opinions about memories that were supposed to be mine.
    Now my dry eyes stared at my parents’ epitaphs. My father’s, in small block letters: “Beloved husband, father, and son. Blessed are the pure of heart.” The letters on my mother’sgravestone said “Wife and Mother.” Some Hebrew at the bottom. I also counted twenty-eight tiny stones on the top of my dad’s marker, thirty-two on my mom’s, which meant that three people visited since I came here last.
    â€œYou think Armstrong showed up?” I didn’t want him coming to this place, standing where I was standing now, marking his visit with a rock and a televised statement.
    Neither Abe nor Miriam thought he’d have the nerve. Lo didn’t care. She just wanted to go through her rituals. She reached into her bag and handed us each a five-by-seven laminated card, the one with Hebrew on the top and transliteration on the bottom. Every year, we recited the Jewish prayer for the dead, because Lo couldn’t imagine not saying it. The explanation at the bottom said that reciting Kaddish allowed a soul to climb to the next level or world.
    I held the card at my side.
    â€œYitgadel, v’yitkadash, shemay rabah.” I memorized these sounds years ago. But that didn’t mean I got it. I didn’t understand how this prayer of all prayers became the one we say now.
    The last line made me angry: “May God who makes peace in the heavens, bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel; and say Amen.”
    Attention: God who made peace—if