December 15, 1943. His grandmother had baked bread that morning, and the whole house smelled like warm, sweet yeast when he came home from Oakland School. It was a Wednesday, and as she did every Wednesday, his grandmother asked him to go with her so he could carry the bags. She was excited about his parents getting home. She was planning food for their arrival. Who knows what he was thinking about. It was the year they had to memorize so many different things, so maybe that—some verse of Longfellow or Over the river and through the woods—or he was thinking about Boy Scouts or what he wanted for Christmas; he is fairly sure that’s the year he asked for a globe and a new baseball glove. But whatever it was vanished the next day.

They were all still in shock when they planned Frank’s move in the late spring. “You’ll be back soon enough,” his grandmother said. “Your mother needs you.”

In the beginning, it sounded like Frank and his mother and the baby would be home by late summer; he would miss baseball, but he would be back for school. But summer became fall, and fall became winter, and by then, Preston had voiced his intentions, and a whole new part of his mother’s life began; that was the part Lil said she could understand, and for years they simply agreed to disagree, Frank a little hurt that she could so easily see his mother’s point of view.

“But what about Grandmother?” he had asked when his mother delivered the news in a series of calm, quiet syllables while Horace wailed from his crib in the next room. “What about our house?” The house would sell, he was told, and his grandmother would move to live with Frank’s Aunt Jenny in Worcester. His mother’s family had dwindled to almost nothing: only a brother still in Maryland, where she had grown up. “What does it matter? We will be together—safe and together. As it should be,” she kept saying, and he soon grew tired of the argument.

A story is easier to fall into than your own life, which is why Frank was always taken with mythology, the explanations of all those unexplainable things: this is how the sun rises, and this is why the moon changes in size. The explanations of death, and what happens after, vary in different cultures, and so much of his life has been preoccupied with just that, the myths of death and all the ancient beliefs of the afterlife. “There was nothing for us to bury,” his mother had said. It’s hard not to think how different it would all be these days with DNA tests and research. Even now there might be traces of his father—his own DNA—in the dirt below his feet.