“Open your eyes, son,” he says, and when Harvey does, he doesn’t look so mean after all. He looks more sad, like when his mom was scrubbing the doo-doo rug or when she’s looking out the window. He has one hair coming out his nose but Harvey doesn’t laugh at that either. “I’m going to need to speak to your mom, again,” he says. “You’re a nice kid, a really good kid, and I want us all to get along.” He says, “Do you understand?” and Harvey nods yes. Harvey asks does he want to hear a joke.

Frank

Frank looks both ways, that endless flat stretch of rails as far as he can see—cotton, tobacco, soybeans all around him, and beyond, the straight line of spindly pines. How odd to be in this place on such a clear summer day, the sun so bright he has to squint; he sees dots if he stares too long, trying once again to imagine that dark, cold night, the sounds, the devastation. He steps carefully from one tie to the next, eyes on the spaces in between, where something shiny might catch his eye. He knows the train schedule and has since his childhood. Even all those years he and Lil lived in Massachusetts, working and raising their children, he knew the schedule through here, could imagine the whistle and the vibrations along these very tracks—the place of his adolescence, and now falling behind him in closed chapters, very few pages remaining.

Lil was the one who first suggested the migration southward and who, with their daughter’s help, studied various communities. She had chosen this place to be near their daughter, a place with mild weather and four seasons; she had in mind that there are world-class medical facilities right down the road, places you don’t want to have to frequent and where he has already spent way too much time. When they arrived, the politics suited them but now have taken a downward turn. There’s a lot he has missed about their home, and lately he would prefer just about anything to pork and golf and ACC basketball. Bacon, barbecue, ham. Pork, pork, and more pork. Brackets for March Madness. Golf, golf, and more golf. i’d rather be golfing, the bumper stickers say, and why would a person who doesn’t play live on a course anyway, except that’s where their daughter said they should be. She’s a lawyer who had come to school in this state and never left.

“You know Richard Nixon went there,” he told her when she was accepted and headed south.

“And you spent much of your childhood there,” she had said. She said he had deprived them of a whole chunk of their history by never visiting, and now it was time.