It will be great. It’s just up ahead. It’s around the corner. Frank hates anticipation, hates waiting. Too often, the waiting is nothing but a lie, an undelivered promise. You’ll feel better soon. No, no, I won’t. We’ll be home on the sixteenth. No, no, you won’t. You’ll come home when your mother is better and able. No, no, I won’t. You come first, Frank. But, no, he didn’t—not as a child and not when his own children arrived, and what sane and loving father wouldn’t want his children to come first, and yet, every now and then, he wondered, When was it his turn? Would he ever get a goddamned turn? His mother didn’t put him first, and neither did Lil during that span of years when she was determined to make up for her mother’s life. “I didn’t marry your goddamned mother,” he had said. “I married you, and you aren’t there anymore!”

And even this move. Why couldn’t he just live to the end without having to visit what has haunted him all these years? It was so easy to ignore it when so far away, but now he can’t not think about it, not revisit.

When the kids were young, they listened eagerly to all he had to tell them: how the heart was weighed against the feather of truth, how the hearts were then fed to the monster. And he showed them the many jars on his shelf, the silliness of their messages—enemies, fantasies, dreams—turned to the wall. Instead, he introduced them as Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef. Liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines. The kids loved hearing how all those good brains were tossed away, as if nothing more than a snot factory. Jeff liked the baboon, and Becca the raven, and Frank told Lil later he was predicting their future based on their choices—Jeff chose lungs, and Becca chose intestines, which he later turned into a family joke. One full of a lot of hot air, and one full of shit.

“I needed to stay there,” Frank’s mother had said. “He asked me not to leave. That was the last thing he said: don’t leave.”

“He was dead.”

“No, he was dying.”

She said, “I went to the restroom, and it saved my life.”

What an odd fact to mark such a shift, and yet it had. And Frank has thought of it so many times when he excused himself to a lavatory in a public space or escaped a cocktail party or a heated discussion to collect his thoughts. Taking refuge there behind a locked door, eye to eye with himself in the mirror as he mouthed the familiar I am here.