My grandfather’s ashes are sitting in a cardboard box on my coffee table. Ten inches wide, eight inches long, five inches deep, a half size smaller than a shoebox. Solid brown. Corrugated cardboard. Heavy like a rain bucket. The lid is closed, but I imagine the inside. Dark, dense, fine ground powder rests behind the vacuum-sealed, see-through plastic. Remains fitted to fill every corner.

            
            I sit on an aluminum beach chair with wooden armrests and green and white plastic crisscrosses, staring at the casket on my coffee table. A generic box reserved for paupers. I picture my father picking up these ashes from the funeral home, placing the box in a plastic grocery bag, and pulling out of the parking lot with the default vessel on the front seat of his magenta minivan.

            
            The beach chair kneads pipe-shaped dents in my carpet. It creaks every time I breathe. I hunch forward pensively, my arms on the wooden armrests. I prop up my chin with my right arm. I grind my fingers up against the muscle knot on the left side of my neck. I see how far forward I can lean before the chair starts to fold in on me.

            
            My grandfather played the banjo and harmonica. Once while driving me home from a visit he put on a recording of “Oh My Darling, Clementine.” I listened to the lyrics and smelled the smell of the Oldsmobile’s air conditioning. He sang along with the tape. His eight-year-old grandson asked in a juvenile pitch why she had to die, why this Clementine had to die. He smiled white teeth and told his grandson not to worry. It was just a song.

            
            I think of my father and uncle, my grandfather’s two sons, deciding where to spread the ashes. I’m the steward of these remains, but they are the next of kin. They’ve entrusted me with a caretaker’s job, a symbolic duty, to hold onto a vacuum-sealed bag in a corrugated cardboard box until they say ready. How will they decide where to scatter the ashes? How will they remember him? What will they say at their ceremony? Who will be the last to look upon the scattering pile, and turn, finally, back toward the car?

            
            I stare at the cardboard box on my coffee table. The ashes inside were my grandfather. The man who played banjo. The man who played harmonica. The man who died before I returned to Florida to say goodbye. I think about whether to put the box in the closet, on the top shelf, behind the spare sheets and the winter hats. A safe place, on the top shelf, behind the spare sheets and winter hats.