their dinner tables. Nini wouldn't know anything other than her baskets of coal and rotten vegetables. Kwen seemed to be a man of the world, as he had been sought by the other family to bury their daughter, but with Kwen's dark secret fresh in his own mind, Bashi would never want him near his grandmother. The only people left were Old Hua and his wife. They took care of babies thrown out like rags; surely they would help to bury an old, respectable woman.
The street was the same one as the day before, but people on the way to their work units would not look at Bashi and understand his loss. He walked south to the riverbank and, from there, along the river to the west. When he was out of sight of the townspeople, he sat down on a boulder and wept.
“What are you crying here for, first thing in the morning?” asked someone, kicking his foot lightly.
Bashi wiped his face with the back of his hand. It was Kwen, a heavy cotton coat on his shoulders and a bag of breakfast in his hand. He must be coming back from the night shift. “Leave me alone,” Bashi said.
“That's not the right way to answer a friendly greeting. Would you care for a piece of pig-head meat?”
Bashi shook his head. “My grandma died,” he said, despite his determination to keep Kwen an enemy.
“When?”
“Last night. This morning. I don't know. She just died.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Kwen said. “But how old was she?”
“Eighty-one.”
“Enough to call it a joyful departure,” Kwen said. “There's no need for the tears. Be happy for her.”
Bashi's eyes reddened. These were the first words of condolence he'd heard, and he almost felt he had to forgive Kwen. “I'm wondering what kind of funeral would honor her life. She's been father and mother and grandmother to me,” Bashi said. The thought of being an orphan made him feel small again, as he had felt on the day his mother deposited him, years earlier, with his grandmother. He tried to cough into his palm but it came out as sobbing.
“Hey, we know you're sad, but if you want to do her a favor, don't waste your time on tears now.”
“What can I do? I've never taken care of a dead person,” he said.
Kwen looked up at the sky. The wind from the night before had died out, and the weather forecast predicted a warm front. The sun, halfway beyond the mountain, promised a good early spring day. “It will thaw in two weeks,” Kwen said. “I would find a place to keep her before thawing. Go to the city hospital and rent her some space.”
“Why didn't the family yesterday rent from the hospital?” Bashi asked, but once the question came out, he regretted it.
“The morgue only accepts bodies from natural deaths.”
“What's a natural death?”
“Like the one with your grandmother.”
The image of the woman's body came back to Bashi. He breathed hard, trying to control a bout of nausea. “Thanks for reminding me,” he said. “I'm going there now.”
“But you're walking in the wrong direction,” Kwen said.
Bashi looked at the road, leading west into the mountain where the woman's body lay butchered under a bush. He wondered if Kwen had seen through him. He wanted to report the news to Old Hua and his wife first, Bashi said, as they were old friends of his grandmother's.
Kwen studied Bashi, and he felt his scalp tighten under the man's gaze. “So I'm going,” Bashi said, raising a hand hesitantly.
Kwen lit a cigarette. “You know I don't like anyone to be naughty around me?”
“Why would I want to? I have my own grandmother to take care of.”
Kwen nodded. “Just a reminder.”
Bashi promised that he would behave and left in haste. He should have returned the boulders to their place the night before. A good detective did not leave any traces of his investigation around. He wondered if it was too late for him to correct his mistake.
The Huas’ cabin was padlocked. Bashi picked up a small piece of coal and wrote big scrawling characters on the door:
The visit to the morgue was disappointing, one more sign that this world was becoming as bad as it could get. The woman at the front desk threw a pad across the table, before Bashi could explain things to her. When he opened his mouth, she pointed to the papers. “Fill them out before you open your mouth.”
It took Bashi some time to work out how to answer the questions. He had forgotten to bring the household register card; the woman wouldn't be too happy about it, but she would certainly understand negligence from a bereft grandson. Perhaps people would regard him differently now that his grandmother was dead; perhaps they would forgive him and love him because he was an orphan. He dipped the pen into the ink bottle and said to the woman as he wrote, “You know, she is the only one I have and I'm her only one too.”
The woman raised an eyebrow and glanced at Bashi without replying. Perhaps she did not know who he was. “My grandma, she left me today,” he explained. “I don't have parents. I never did, as long as I can remember.”
“Did I say not to open your mouth before finishing the forms?”
“Yes, but I'm just being friendly,” Bashi said. “You don't have many people to talk with you here, do you?”
The woman sighed and put a magazine up in front of her eyes. He looked at the magazine cover;
