In the year following his return, Zeno sends a dozen letters to Rex, adhering strictly to questions regarding translation—imperative or infinitive? accusative or genitive?—ceding all romantic ground to Hillary. He sneaks the letters out of the house inside his shirt and mails them before work, cheeks burning as he slips them into the box. Then he waits for weeks, but Rex’s replies do not come quickly or regularly, and Zeno loses whatever bravery he began with. The gods on Olympus, sipping from their cups of horn, peer through the roof of the house and watch him struggle at his desk, mockery on their faces.

The vanity of assuming that Rex might have wanted him in that way. An orphan, a coward, a snowplow driver with a cardboard suitcase and a polyester suit: Who was Zeno to expect anything?

He learns of Rex’s death from Hillary in an airmail letter written in purple cursive. Rex, Hillary reports, was in Egypt, working with his beloved papyrus, trying to claw back one more sentence from oblivion, when he had a heart attack.

You were, Hillary writes, very dear to him. His huge, loopy signature takes up half the page.

Seasons tick past. Zeno wakes in the afternoons, dresses in the cramped upstairs room, creaks downstairs, rouses Mrs. Boydstun from her nap. Puts her in her chair, brushes her hair, feeds her dinner, wheels her to her puzzle, pours her two fingers of Old Forester. Turns on the television. Takes the note from the counter: Beef, onions, lipstick, buy the right red this time. Before he leaves for work, he carries her to her bed.

Tantrums, doctor’s appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist’s office in Boise—he sits with her through it all. Still he sleeps upstairs in the little brass bed, Rex’s Compendium of Lost Books and the Liddell and Scott entombed in a cardboard box beneath his desk. Some mornings, on the way home from work, he eases his plow to the side of the road and watches light seep into the valley, and it’s all he can do to get himself to drive the final mile home. In the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Boydstun’s coughs go submarine, as though she carries lakewater in her chest. He wonders if she’ll share any last words, any memories of his father, any insight into their relationship, if she’ll call him son or say she’s grateful for his years of care, grateful that she became his guardian, or show any sign that she understands his predicaments, but at the end she’s hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.