Cynthia Kadohata - Kira Kira

When he finally returned, he threw some things into the trunk and got in. If anything, he seemed angrier than before.

"What kind of man puts traps like that in a field? What is he trying to catch?"

"Squirrels?"

He looked at me. "Squirrels?!"

He started the car suddenly, and we lurched across the field toward Mr. Lyndon's house. My heart pounded as we bumped across the grass. I thought maybe my father wanted to yell at Mr. Lyndon. This terrified me. First of all, it was as if my father had turned into a different person. Where was my real father, who always looked before he leapt? Second of all, Mr. Lyndon was, well, he was Mr. Lyndon. You couldn't just go to his house to yell at him. And shouldn't we go home to take care of my mother and Sammy?

We reached the private road in front of the mansion, and my father kept driving. He stopped not far from the house and opened up our trunk and pulled out a two-by-four. He walked up the driveway to a red Cadillac and crashed the wood into the front windshield.

Glass exploded outward and sprinkled to the ground. I thought I saw someone peek out the windows at this madman who was my father. My father got in and we roared away.

I looked at him, but his face held no expression. Lynn once said our father was the most determined man in the world. I remembered once how she and I had seen someone act rude to our father. Later I asked her why our father didn't hit the rude man. Lynn said that he accepted rudeness and unfairness to himself, just as he accepted hard work. If he could have, he would have worked all the time and never slept. My father was the most generous man in the world. I knew that without Lynn telling me so. If Mr. Lyndon or any other man had come to our house feeling hungry, my father would have welcomed him and given him the best food in our kitchen— the freshest fish, the hottest rice, the sweetest pastries. He would have made us be polite. He would accept anything and anyone, so long as he could earn a living to help his family. But I saw that on this one day, for the first time since I'd known him, he could not accept the way his life was turning out.

I watched our small town pass by. We drove right past where we should have turned to go home. We didn't stop until we were in the next town. Then my father pulled over and lay back against his car seat. I didn't move. He was my father, but I was not sure whether he was sane. Since Lynn had been sick, he'd been grumpier, but I'd never seen anything like tonight.

He studied me.

"Hungry?" he said.

"Uh-huh."

"Yeah, I know you are."

Our car suddenly filled with light, and then a sheriff's car pulled in front of us. The sheriff got out and slowly walked over. He shone a flashlight at us. My father rolled down the window.

"Going for a ride?" said the sheriff.

My father hesitated. I saw that he suddenly couldn't think. I felt a protective surge. I'd never felt before that I had to protect my father. But now I needed to protect him against this man. The only thing I could think to say was, "We're on our way to eat tacos!"

"Tacos?" said the sheriff. He looked confused. 'You mean at Pepe's?"

'Yes, sir," I said, though I had never heard of Pepe's. As a matter of fact, I'd eaten tacos only once, years earlier in a restaurant in Illinois. I have no idea why I came up with tacos.

The sheriff studied my father. "We just had an incident at Mr. Lyndon's house."

"Oh?" said my father.

"Someone busted up his Caddy"

"Oh."

The sheriff shone the light on me. "They think the perpetrator drove a light blue Ford." Our Oldsmobile was gray, light gray. The sheriff moved his light over the outside of our gray car. My father leaned out and said, "I've always been an Oldsmobile man."

The sheriff leaned in with his light shining on me. I smiled, but he could tell I'd been crying. "Something the matter?" he said.

"My sister died," I said. I let out a sob.

He turned off the light. He seemed to think. The night had grown cool, and when he breathed through his mouth, mist filled the air in front of his face. He switched on the flashlight again and pointed it at my father. He turned it off again. He straightened up and nodded at my father. "Better get her some tacos."

We drove off in a new direction and stopped at a small Mexican restaurant called Pepe's. I didn't say anything, but I felt pretty surprised at this new turn of events. I had loved tacos the one time I ate them. But it was weird to eat them now, in my saddest moment.

The floor of the restaurant was made of brick-colored tiles, and all the tables were covered with pretty blue-and-white tile. Ponchos and sombreros hung on the walls. A singer crooned in Spanish from the record player. The atmosphere was festive. A waiter approached us and said, "Dinner for two, amigo?"

The night didn't seem real. My sister was dead, and I was about to eat tacos. I ordered five of them. In Illinois, I had eaten one. Now I ate all five of my tacos while my father watched, impressed and then maybe a little worried. "You don't want to get indigestion," he said.

When we got home, my mother was sewing a hem in the kitchen. She was fixing my black dress that I knew I would be wearing to the funeral.

"I was worried," she said.

"Katie ate five tacos," said my dad. "That takes time."

He and my mother both looked at my stomach as if expecting to see it explode. When it didn't explode, my mother raised her eyes to my father. She said the thing she liked to say when she wanted to remind him that he could not afford any sort of unusual behavior. "You've got a long day tomorrow."

He and my mother left the kitchen. She didn't ask me to wash the dishes. And she didn't do them herself. I had never known my mother to go to sleep with a sink full of dirty dishes. And I never washed them myself unless I'd been nagged. But that night I thought I should. I cleaned the counters and even took a mop to the floor. I wasn't sure what sponge to use for the counters. It seemed to me that my mother used a different sponge depending on what she was doing. But there was only one sponge at the sink. An array of bottles and jars of cleaning fluids sat under the sink. But there were no more sponges. I could imagine my mother getting annoyed if I used the wrong sponge. If Lynn were here, she would have been able to tell me what sponge I should have used, she would have been able to tell me what I should do next. I did not know what to do without her to tell me. I lowered my head to the kitchen table and cried. Finally I wet a dishtowel and used that to clean the counters, the table, and even the chair seats. It was late when I finished. I sat at our table and did not know what to do next.

Later on I lay in bed and saw the happy little moth, still alive, flitting from the night-light up the wall and back to the night-light. And it occurred to me what I had seen in Lynn's eyes the night before: She was wishing she were that moth. Maybe that was the last thing she ever wished.

We were holding the services at the funeral home. I was supposed to give one of the eulogies because everybody said Lynn loved me more than anything in the world. I thought every spare moment about my speech. I also needed to write an essay for school about a family subject or theme, so I decided to make my speech the same as my essay. But I couldn't even think of the first sentence. I looked up "theme" in Lynn's dictionary. It said: an implied idea in a work of art. I thought about that for a while, and then I gave up.

My parents were busy, and Sam was sleeping. When she was a girl, my mother had dreamed of owning a flower shop, so she drew dozens of diagrams of how she might organize and display the flowers for the funeral. My father took care of all the arrangements that required dealing with the outer world, all the arrangements with the funeral home, and so on.