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This couldn’t be the right place. Maybe his father was a Smith on his mother’s side, although Joe was pretty sure his grandmother’s maiden name was Morris.
    He wanted to ask Vivian to double check, but he didn’t want to make his presence known and maybe get her kicked out. She turned in a slow, unobtrusive circle, clearly trying to show him the full scene. Two older men in black suits stood near the plaque. They must be his father’s chess club—professors who had visited his father in the home. One had removed his suit coat and hung it over his arm, but the other seemed more concerned with propriety than comfort, even on such a hot day.
    From his father’s emails, Joe knew more than he wanted to about both men. One was a brilliant mathematician who had never achieved the recognition Joe’s father thought he deserved. The other one might have had an affair with Joe’s mother, or at least his father had hinted at it. In a movie, one of them would have murdered his father, but they hadn’t.
    Ever wary, Joe had asked his lawyer, Mr. Rossi, to hire a medical examiner to review the autopsy performed on his father’s body. The second doctor concurred that his father had died of a heart attack. He was eighty-two years old and had suffered two previous heart attacks. The medical examiner had tested his father’s tissues for poisons, and every test that had come back so far was negative. He was an old man who had died of natural causes, like the original report said. Joe was still glad he’d double checked.
    The camera moved past the professors to settle on a woman who had just arrived. She held a simple black box and wore a black dress, a wide-brimmed black hat, and a dotted veil that looked like something Marlene Dietrich would have worn. Even though his mother hadn’t performed for decades, she walked with the graceful step of a young dancer, each movement elegant and choreographed. She looked the part of the grieving widow, even though she had divorced Joe’s father twenty years before.
    Vivian must have recognized her, because she kept the camera pointed there. His mother looked from side to side, as if searching for someone in the small group of mourners. Her veil fluttered in the breeze.
    Guilt rose up in Joe. She was looking for him, her only child. She expected him to be at his father’s funeral, and he wasn’t. The man she had raised wouldn’t have shamed her by missing such an important event. He would have paid his respects. But he hadn’t.
    She pulled the simple black box closer to her chest. The box’s ebony surface gleamed in the sun. That box contained his father’s ashes. Joe swallowed the lump in his throat. After he’d received the phone call from his mother telling him that his father was dead, he’d arranged the funeral and picked out the box to hold his father’s ashes, but he hadn’t really accepted that the man was dead until he saw the box in his mother’s arms.
    Edison dropped his warm head in Joe’s lap. He stroked the dog’s ears, and Edison wagged his tail—one solid thump (cyan). Joe took a careful breath, held it, and let it out. His father was gone. There would be no reconciliation for them now. Joe had had very good reasons to cut his father out of his life, but looking at the black box made it all so very final.
    A man took his mother’s arm. He looked about fifty, ten or so years younger than she, and handsome in a craggy thirties movie star way. Vivian caught the man’s solicitous face in profile, and Joe was struck by how much the man looked like a younger version of his father.
    Joe had no doubt this man and his mother were romantically involved. Men had always flocked to his mother.
    The camera stayed on her as she stepped across the grass. The chess players watched her advance, both smiling a greeting as if they knew her. Had his mother and father stayed in touch till the end, so much so that she knew his friends?
    They’d separated when Joe was ten, and he and